FROM THE GUEST EDITOR'S DESK
Making Justice:
Practical Theology, the Arts, and Transformation
by Joyce Ann Mercer, Guest Editor, Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care at Yale Divinity School, and President of the Association of Practical Theology
This issue of ARTS comes out of a collaboration between the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies (SARTS) and the Association of Practical Theology (APT). For its 2018 biennial meeting, the APT convened around the theme, “Making Justice: Practical Theology, the Arts, and Transformation.” Response to the meeting’s call for proposals was among the strongest in the APT’s history, with scholars, practitioners, and graduate students in practical theology enthusiastically answering the invitation to break away from the standard practice of reading scholarly papers by instead engaging the arts as both discourse and medium for practical theological reflection. The resulting conference included sessions featuring spoken word, jazz performance, film production, gospel music, a stage reading of an original play, analysis of material arts including sculpture and painting, and a liturgical art installation in the Yale Divinity School chapel. Through these and other art forms, scholars addressed both historical and contemporary matters of justice through practical theological reflection on issues such as human trafficking and sex slavery, ecological degradation, racism, xenophobia and migration, poverty, mass incarceration, and more. The articles that follow in this issue of ARTS are a small selection of the fruits of this meeting. An additional article may be found in the online edition of ARTS at http://societyarts.org/online-edition.
In “‘The Little Girl’ in Manhattan: A Theological Reading of the Comfort Women Statue,” Hyunwoo Han Koo of Boston University explores the power of the life-sized, sculpted image of a young Korean girl to offer a criticism of the sexual slavery of Korean (and other Southeast Asian) women as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Koo utilizes Johann Baptist Metz’s theology of dangerous memories of suffering and of resurrection, alongside South Korean Christian feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyun’s concept of Jesus as Mother, to speak to this still largely unacknowledged, traumatic violence against women as a weapon of war. The statue, strategically placed across from the Japanese Embassy, with replicas in San Francisco and Manhattan, serves as a “dis-comforting” indictment to those who would prefer to forget the former comfort women and their plight, even as it functions as a site for healing for the women victims and their descendants.
Deborah Sokolove and Amy Gray, both from Wesley Theological Seminary and the Henry C. Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion, created a collaborative work of liturgical art for the conference as a way to explore the role of contemplation in practical theological struggles for justice. Their article describes and reflects upon their creation of a small “forest” in the chapel—a “sacred grove” for prayer. Noting the spiritual symbolism of trees in many traditions including Christianity, they give attention to the ecological justice dimensions of artistic production: their installation utilized all-recyclable materials, and was “repurposed” for use by the Yale Divinity School chapel for its Earth Day celebration following the conference. Sokolove and Gray’s work offers a critique of notions of “disinterested aesthetic contemplation” as the expected ways for educated people to engage the arts. Instead, they claim art as a social practice calling for active engagement.
The APT biennial conference was not the first opportunity for collaboration between Ruth Illman and W. Alan Smith. Illman, director of the Donner Institute in Finland, and W. Alan Smith, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Florida Southern College, are co-authors of an important volume, Theology and the Arts: Engaging Faith (2013, Routledge), that has helped to shape the interdisciplinary conversation between practical theology and the arts. In their conference presentation published here, Illman and Smith build on their prior work, exploring “interreligious sonic space” as they consider the transformative power of an amateur choir in Germany directed by two cantors, one Jewish and one Christian. They describe the Interreligiöser Chor Frankfurt’s performance of Psalm 46 in a concert to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Psalm 46, known as the source-psalm for Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” was one among other pieces sung by the choir, followed by a panel discussion by three scholars from different Abrahamic religious traditions. Illman and Smith’s analysis of these events focuses on the dialogical function of music. They note, “Practical theology engages in practices that create spaces in the experience of persons and communities where individuals are enabled to dialogue with one another as fellow subjects.” With the help of Spanish musician and musicologist Jordi Savall, Illman and Smith plumb this dialogical function of music for performers and listeners alike.
John P. Falcone of Union Theological Seminary in New York was the primary organizer of and energy behind the APT’s hosting of a pre-conference workshop to teach practical theologians how to use social justice-oriented, improvisational “Theater of the Oppressed” (TO) methods in their pedagogies. A practical theologian and religious educator, Falcone’s conference presentation reflects on his larger experience of working with TO’s improvisational performance methods toward social analysis and transformation, as developed by Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal. Falcone asks why these embodied creative practices work so well in North America as a means of teaching and learning around difficult justice issues. He discovers a helpful resource in the “semiotic realism” of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce, “a coherent framework that links embodiment, spirituality and social dynamics with scientific and humanistic forms of inquiry.” His article offers a succinct summary of several TO exercises toward engaging Piercian categories to make sense of these practices.
The final conference article included in this issue focuses on the practice of “upcycling,” or the reuse and creation of something new that is even better than the original. Aimee Moiso of Vanderbilt University brings the field of conflict transformation into conversation with practical theology’s interest in practices of creativity and imagination. She finds in the practice of upcycling “a paradigm for fostering the creativity and moral imagination necessary for a Christian practice of conflict transformation.” John Paul Lederach, often considered the pioneer of Christian conflict transformation theory and practice, calls for attention to artistic and creative processes to break through roadblocks to change. Moiso invokes Lederach’s emphasis as she explores upcycling’s imaginative, value-adding reuse that fosters delight in practices designed to avoid the creation of waste, as a “metaphor for our interdependence” that can change how humans view ourselves.
The profoundly moving red dirt installations by Rena Detrixhe, exquisite and sometimes searing poetry of Karen Georgia A. Thompson, and Richard Viladesau’s review of The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy by Robin M. Jensen (2017, Harvard University Press), frame the articles beautifully.
On behalf of the Association of Practical Theology, I thank SARTS for partnering with us and also express our deep gratitude to editor Kimberly Vrudny for the opportunity to share the work of our members with you.
I hope you find these writings and images rich and thought provoking.
In “‘The Little Girl’ in Manhattan: A Theological Reading of the Comfort Women Statue,” Hyunwoo Han Koo of Boston University explores the power of the life-sized, sculpted image of a young Korean girl to offer a criticism of the sexual slavery of Korean (and other Southeast Asian) women as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Koo utilizes Johann Baptist Metz’s theology of dangerous memories of suffering and of resurrection, alongside South Korean Christian feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyun’s concept of Jesus as Mother, to speak to this still largely unacknowledged, traumatic violence against women as a weapon of war. The statue, strategically placed across from the Japanese Embassy, with replicas in San Francisco and Manhattan, serves as a “dis-comforting” indictment to those who would prefer to forget the former comfort women and their plight, even as it functions as a site for healing for the women victims and their descendants.
Deborah Sokolove and Amy Gray, both from Wesley Theological Seminary and the Henry C. Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion, created a collaborative work of liturgical art for the conference as a way to explore the role of contemplation in practical theological struggles for justice. Their article describes and reflects upon their creation of a small “forest” in the chapel—a “sacred grove” for prayer. Noting the spiritual symbolism of trees in many traditions including Christianity, they give attention to the ecological justice dimensions of artistic production: their installation utilized all-recyclable materials, and was “repurposed” for use by the Yale Divinity School chapel for its Earth Day celebration following the conference. Sokolove and Gray’s work offers a critique of notions of “disinterested aesthetic contemplation” as the expected ways for educated people to engage the arts. Instead, they claim art as a social practice calling for active engagement.
The APT biennial conference was not the first opportunity for collaboration between Ruth Illman and W. Alan Smith. Illman, director of the Donner Institute in Finland, and W. Alan Smith, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Florida Southern College, are co-authors of an important volume, Theology and the Arts: Engaging Faith (2013, Routledge), that has helped to shape the interdisciplinary conversation between practical theology and the arts. In their conference presentation published here, Illman and Smith build on their prior work, exploring “interreligious sonic space” as they consider the transformative power of an amateur choir in Germany directed by two cantors, one Jewish and one Christian. They describe the Interreligiöser Chor Frankfurt’s performance of Psalm 46 in a concert to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Psalm 46, known as the source-psalm for Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” was one among other pieces sung by the choir, followed by a panel discussion by three scholars from different Abrahamic religious traditions. Illman and Smith’s analysis of these events focuses on the dialogical function of music. They note, “Practical theology engages in practices that create spaces in the experience of persons and communities where individuals are enabled to dialogue with one another as fellow subjects.” With the help of Spanish musician and musicologist Jordi Savall, Illman and Smith plumb this dialogical function of music for performers and listeners alike.
John P. Falcone of Union Theological Seminary in New York was the primary organizer of and energy behind the APT’s hosting of a pre-conference workshop to teach practical theologians how to use social justice-oriented, improvisational “Theater of the Oppressed” (TO) methods in their pedagogies. A practical theologian and religious educator, Falcone’s conference presentation reflects on his larger experience of working with TO’s improvisational performance methods toward social analysis and transformation, as developed by Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal. Falcone asks why these embodied creative practices work so well in North America as a means of teaching and learning around difficult justice issues. He discovers a helpful resource in the “semiotic realism” of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce, “a coherent framework that links embodiment, spirituality and social dynamics with scientific and humanistic forms of inquiry.” His article offers a succinct summary of several TO exercises toward engaging Piercian categories to make sense of these practices.
The final conference article included in this issue focuses on the practice of “upcycling,” or the reuse and creation of something new that is even better than the original. Aimee Moiso of Vanderbilt University brings the field of conflict transformation into conversation with practical theology’s interest in practices of creativity and imagination. She finds in the practice of upcycling “a paradigm for fostering the creativity and moral imagination necessary for a Christian practice of conflict transformation.” John Paul Lederach, often considered the pioneer of Christian conflict transformation theory and practice, calls for attention to artistic and creative processes to break through roadblocks to change. Moiso invokes Lederach’s emphasis as she explores upcycling’s imaginative, value-adding reuse that fosters delight in practices designed to avoid the creation of waste, as a “metaphor for our interdependence” that can change how humans view ourselves.
The profoundly moving red dirt installations by Rena Detrixhe, exquisite and sometimes searing poetry of Karen Georgia A. Thompson, and Richard Viladesau’s review of The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy by Robin M. Jensen (2017, Harvard University Press), frame the articles beautifully.
On behalf of the Association of Practical Theology, I thank SARTS for partnering with us and also express our deep gratitude to editor Kimberly Vrudny for the opportunity to share the work of our members with you.
I hope you find these writings and images rich and thought provoking.