IN THE STUDY
Body and Spirit Together:
Theatre of the Oppressed, Pragmatist Semiotics, and
Practical Theological Method
by John Falcone
John P. Falcone received his PhD in Theology and Education from Boston College in 2015. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
John P. Falcone received his PhD in Theology and Education from Boston College in 2015. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
As a practical theologian, I have found that the metaphor that best captures my theological method is artistry—a creative and critical representation of experience designed to make the world more humane, more open to God’s justice and truth. My path to this metaphor has gone through Theater of the Oppressed (“TO”), a transformative practice of embodied social analysis. As a technique, TO has enriched my teaching, ministry, and research. As a model for incarnated theological reflection, it points to a pressing conceptual need: a framework for understanding theological method that integrates incarnation, spirit, creativity, and science. I propose that semiotic realism fits that need: it can help us clarify and explain what we are doing as practical theologians even better than other hermeneutical frameworks current in our field.
Several practical theologians have already argued that artistry is central to our academic practice, for example Maria Harris (religious education as the training of artists), Rebecca Chopp (“theologizing” as a rhetorical art), and Heather Walton (writing and spiritual autobiography as artistic theological practices).1 What semiotic realism offers is a coherent framework that links embodiment, spirituality, and social dynamics with scientific and humanistic forms of inquiry, in ways that are intelligible to academics and lay people alike.
The Elements and the Stakes
As a liberationist practical theologian, I understand my academic “tribe” as embracing the following commitments. We are interested in religious practices, and we are open to understanding “religion” and “practice” in new, illuminating ways. We attend to embodiment; we notice how bodily habitus intersects with identities; we notice boundaries and forms of discipline; we pay attention to power relations—to those which reinscribe sin and brokenness, and to those which open up possibilities for healing and fullness of life. We start with the wounds of experience. We look for evidence of meaning, transformation, and divinely willed possibilities by beginning in places of suffering. We seek tools for understanding and transforming problematic situations. Hence, we are eager to engage science and philosophy, particularly the social sciences and philosophies of interpretation. In sum, we engage in the “circle of praxis” in which inquiry moves from practice to critical reflection, and thence back to practice in more critically, religiously resourced ways.
More specifically, I am a religious educator who has fallen in love with TO: an embodied pedagogy that uses improvisational performance to pursue social analysis and to foster democratic change. TO was developed by the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1931-2009). He combined the Marxist theater of Bertolt Brecht, the character acting methods of Constantin Stanislavski, and the pedagogy of Paulo Freire.2 TO seeks to restore the “means of artistic production” to the public; to awaken expressive capacities; to uncover reality with greater frankness by zeroing in on suffering, tension, and conflict; to foster participatory democracy; to rehearse revolutionary change. TO encourages participants to stretch themselves—to create art with their bodies, and then to interpret the art they have created. These artworks express through gesture and drama what words and thoughts alone might overlook. They are not necessarily true, but they do provide richer grist for the mill of discernment and interpretation. To interpret here has two meanings. On the one hand, interpretation means to unpack the artwork using words: what might lie behind the tableau/composition?; how do its parts feel and function together?; what possibilities for future action might it suggest? On the other hand, interpretation means to turn one artwork into another. Participants unpack questions verbally, but they also unpack them by creating further images, sometimes digging deeper, sometimes reaching for the ideal. TO trains participants to “interpret” in both senses of the word.
Boal’s writings can be inspirational; his books are loaded with shrewd coaching and detailed, practical guidelines. But he is no academic: his argumentation is often doctrinaire, and unsettlingly free-wheeling. A coherent philosophical framework that explains TO’s own effectiveness would be of use to academic practical theologians, because it might also tie together many of our own methodological commitments. Semiotic realism provides just such a framework.
Semiotic realism is rooted in the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914).3 Peirce was an active scientist and systematic philosopher who founded the American Pragmatist school of philosophy. While many Pragmatists took a relativist turn in their philosophies, Peirce took up the enduring themes of Pragmatist philosophy—naturalistic explanation, social constructivism, and a keen focus on particular, situated human experiences—and embedded them in a semiotic realist framework: realist because it affirms a world where facts, impressions, and tendencies push back against our constructed interpretations; semiotic because it traces how every thought and experience is mediated by sign-making and interpretation. His architectonic (big picture) thinking links metaphysics, aesthetics, and morality with hermeneutics, scientific method, and the natural sciences. In this essay, I focus on three Peircean arguments: 1.) the continuity between body, feeling, habit, and thought; 2.) the process of inventing and interpreting signs; and 3.) the need to test our hypotheses against the data of experience.
The Practice of TO
Augusto Boal joined the politically progressive Teatro Arena of Sâo Paolo, Brazil, in 1956, after studying and working in the New York theater scene. Arena combined local culture, social critique, and innovative theatrical practice. Following Brecht, they created drama that instigated conflict instead of resolving it; following Stanislavski, they trained actors to plumb body memories in order to generate vibrant performances. Over time, they rejected agit-prop in favor of new techniques that erased the boundary between audience and stage. When Boal was forced into exile by the military authorities, he came into contact with Freire’s “culture circles,” where teachers and students co-investigate social settings by creating and studying “codifications” (drawings, photos, or other artworks that re-present learner realities in pithy ways). Boal’s innovation was to coach learners in creating codifications with their own bodies:
Several practical theologians have already argued that artistry is central to our academic practice, for example Maria Harris (religious education as the training of artists), Rebecca Chopp (“theologizing” as a rhetorical art), and Heather Walton (writing and spiritual autobiography as artistic theological practices).1 What semiotic realism offers is a coherent framework that links embodiment, spirituality, and social dynamics with scientific and humanistic forms of inquiry, in ways that are intelligible to academics and lay people alike.
The Elements and the Stakes
As a liberationist practical theologian, I understand my academic “tribe” as embracing the following commitments. We are interested in religious practices, and we are open to understanding “religion” and “practice” in new, illuminating ways. We attend to embodiment; we notice how bodily habitus intersects with identities; we notice boundaries and forms of discipline; we pay attention to power relations—to those which reinscribe sin and brokenness, and to those which open up possibilities for healing and fullness of life. We start with the wounds of experience. We look for evidence of meaning, transformation, and divinely willed possibilities by beginning in places of suffering. We seek tools for understanding and transforming problematic situations. Hence, we are eager to engage science and philosophy, particularly the social sciences and philosophies of interpretation. In sum, we engage in the “circle of praxis” in which inquiry moves from practice to critical reflection, and thence back to practice in more critically, religiously resourced ways.
More specifically, I am a religious educator who has fallen in love with TO: an embodied pedagogy that uses improvisational performance to pursue social analysis and to foster democratic change. TO was developed by the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1931-2009). He combined the Marxist theater of Bertolt Brecht, the character acting methods of Constantin Stanislavski, and the pedagogy of Paulo Freire.2 TO seeks to restore the “means of artistic production” to the public; to awaken expressive capacities; to uncover reality with greater frankness by zeroing in on suffering, tension, and conflict; to foster participatory democracy; to rehearse revolutionary change. TO encourages participants to stretch themselves—to create art with their bodies, and then to interpret the art they have created. These artworks express through gesture and drama what words and thoughts alone might overlook. They are not necessarily true, but they do provide richer grist for the mill of discernment and interpretation. To interpret here has two meanings. On the one hand, interpretation means to unpack the artwork using words: what might lie behind the tableau/composition?; how do its parts feel and function together?; what possibilities for future action might it suggest? On the other hand, interpretation means to turn one artwork into another. Participants unpack questions verbally, but they also unpack them by creating further images, sometimes digging deeper, sometimes reaching for the ideal. TO trains participants to “interpret” in both senses of the word.
Boal’s writings can be inspirational; his books are loaded with shrewd coaching and detailed, practical guidelines. But he is no academic: his argumentation is often doctrinaire, and unsettlingly free-wheeling. A coherent philosophical framework that explains TO’s own effectiveness would be of use to academic practical theologians, because it might also tie together many of our own methodological commitments. Semiotic realism provides just such a framework.
Semiotic realism is rooted in the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914).3 Peirce was an active scientist and systematic philosopher who founded the American Pragmatist school of philosophy. While many Pragmatists took a relativist turn in their philosophies, Peirce took up the enduring themes of Pragmatist philosophy—naturalistic explanation, social constructivism, and a keen focus on particular, situated human experiences—and embedded them in a semiotic realist framework: realist because it affirms a world where facts, impressions, and tendencies push back against our constructed interpretations; semiotic because it traces how every thought and experience is mediated by sign-making and interpretation. His architectonic (big picture) thinking links metaphysics, aesthetics, and morality with hermeneutics, scientific method, and the natural sciences. In this essay, I focus on three Peircean arguments: 1.) the continuity between body, feeling, habit, and thought; 2.) the process of inventing and interpreting signs; and 3.) the need to test our hypotheses against the data of experience.
The Practice of TO
Augusto Boal joined the politically progressive Teatro Arena of Sâo Paolo, Brazil, in 1956, after studying and working in the New York theater scene. Arena combined local culture, social critique, and innovative theatrical practice. Following Brecht, they created drama that instigated conflict instead of resolving it; following Stanislavski, they trained actors to plumb body memories in order to generate vibrant performances. Over time, they rejected agit-prop in favor of new techniques that erased the boundary between audience and stage. When Boal was forced into exile by the military authorities, he came into contact with Freire’s “culture circles,” where teachers and students co-investigate social settings by creating and studying “codifications” (drawings, photos, or other artworks that re-present learner realities in pithy ways). Boal’s innovation was to coach learners in creating codifications with their own bodies:
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first [participants] create images based on their own direct experiences; then they analyze the power relations and root causes of the oppression expressed within those images; and finally they act to transform the situation according to their vision of possible alternatives.4
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Later developments included “Rainbow of Desire” (therapeutic techniques for “First World” oppressions); “Legislative Theatre” (using neighborhood drama to craft and pass municipal legislation); and more. Since the mid-1990s, TO has been gaining greater prominence among critical educators, activists, and theologians. To date, it has been used in prisons, war-zones, impoverished neighborhoods, youth outreach and public health programs, university classrooms, and ministry settings.5
In TO, the first stage is to come to know the body in a new way; the second, to make the body expressive; and the third, to use theater as a new language for action and thought. Facilitating takes practice, but even novices can participate in (or lead) rudimentary forms in each stage. Stage 1 exercises “de-mechanize” the body/mind by bringing to conscious attention what they simultaneously loosen up: “the body and its mechanisms, its atrophies and hypertrophies, its capacities for recuperation, restructuring, reharmonization.”6 One key goal is to make bodily hexis (the way we hold our own bodies after years of inscription by class, family, church, school, work, and personal history) into the object of thoughtful reflection. A second goal is to shake up fixed ways of thinking by disrupting our fixed ways of moving. For example, in the “Hypnosis” exercise, one participant is mesmerized by a spot in the middle of the other’s hand. As the hypnotizer moves her hand, the follower maintains his facial distance and spatial orientation, and the rest of his body follows. The hypnotizer is responsible for keeping the follower safe while stretching the boundaries of “normal” movement in fun, challenging ways. After three or four minutes of gentle, creative, often silly contortion, hypnotizer and follower switch roles. Participants then describe what they noticed and how they felt.7
Participants use their newly limbered bodies to express feelings, ideas, hopes, and future visions in stage 2. One of the most basic of games is “Complete the Image”:
This game explores how one image can generate multiple meanings; it drills players in creative, improvisational problem-solving; and it vividly demonstrates how to transform a social setting simply by adjusting one’s own personal “stance.”
Stage 3 performances dissect, re-imagine, and creatively reconstruct social realities; they help participants think collectively about goals and strategies for transformation. In Image Theater, participants can interrogate, modify, and animate each other’s bodily images. In one example, a participant expresses a challenging moment by “sculpting” a handful of group members into an oppressive mise-en-scène. She uses only her gestures and her facial expressions to shape the actors’ bodies (no words). Next, the participant sculpts the same group into a scene that demonstrates the “ideal” transformation of that scenario. Finally, the onlookers engage the tableau, sculpting the individual actors into an intermediate shape—the shape of transformation, the first step toward revolutionary change. Discussion and analysis follow.9 Image Theatre fosters dialogue without depending on verbal dexterity. It delays the kind of verbal labeling that channels our thinking prematurely. It allows multiple points of view to arise, and it makes interpretation a communal project.
Forum Theater is TO’s signature genre, in which spectators become “spect-actors” and “rehearse” revolutionary change. In a classic Forum, the group develops a brief skit based on a real-life occasion of oppression. The skit is run through once: from beginning, to resistance, to ultimate failure. On the second go through, audience members can interrupt the skit’s action at any time to replace the protagonist and try their hand at overcoming the oppression. The “Joker” (TO for the “facilitator,” or as Boal would have it, the “difficultator”) acts as a critical art coach, encourages brainstorming, and helps participants weed out solutions that are “easier said than done.” An even simpler example is “Space and Territory”:
Liberationist practical theologians can use TO both inside and outside the classroom because it is congruent with the commitments of their field. They can use “Hypnosis” or other games to analyze power dynamics; use Image Theater to explore “church,” “marriage,” “work,” “sin,” “salvation” (as we currently know them or as we wish we could have them); use Image and Forum to explore biblical narratives (what are the thoughts and desires of the different characters?; what if they had acted differently?). They can use TO to enrich Theological Action Research or other projects of qualitative inquiry. TO starts with the wounds of experience and seeks to return there with clearer visions and better equipment. It attends to flesh, mentality, and power. It explores the disciplines, patterns, and possibilities of incarnated practice. It works to unblock the creative, interpretive process: to allow lively inquiry to flow.
The incarnational and creative dimensions of TO fit particularly well with artistic visions of practical theology. They also fit with the circle of praxis as the latter has been articulated by youth ministry theologian David White:'
White’s “Circle of Discernment” is recognizably Christian. It is framed in the time-honored language of discernment and correlated with Jesus’ “Great Commandment” (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind,” Lk 10:27 NRSV / NIV). It gives equal weight to embodied affections, inquiry, imagination, and well-planned concrete interventions, taking seriously what is discovered in each of these stages.
As Maria Harris has said, the goal is to treat each discovery as a “point of departure,” remaining true to each of them as we fashion fresh faithful actions and understandings. Or to use another of Harris’s metaphors, the goal is not to trip ourselves up as we “dance” through the paces of heart, mind, tradition, and imagination, to the beat of the Spirit, among the realities of life.
Semiotic Realism
Models and metaphors like these point to an incarnational, holistic framework for doing practical theology. But they must contend with the functional dualisms that pervade much of common sense and academic discourse in the present day. Dualisms distinguish “two interrelated realities in such a way as to render their real relationship subsequently unintelligible.”12 Dualisms such as mind-soul/body, rational/emotive, objective/subjective, even male/female and science/humanities, hobble our thinking and underwrite oppressive hierarchical splits. Peirce sought to develop a coherent framework that undermines dualisms by integrating body, creativity, the spiritual, and the scientific.
Semiotic realism emphasizes the continuities between matter, nature, mind, and spirit; the process of semiosis (sign-making-and-interpretation); and the need for rigor and courage in inquiry. Its understanding of continuity is based on Peirce’s metaphysics of experience. Its understanding of semiosis is based on Peirce’s triadic analysis of the relationship between “signifier” and “signified.” And its understanding of inquiry is based on a fallibilistic, communitarian philosophy of science. Each of these elements has attracted the interest of systematic theologians.13 I encourage practical theologians to embrace the whole package.
“Experience” plays a central role in practical theology, but it is a slippery concept to nail down. Peirce proposes two radical thoughts: first, an experience is something that can have an impact; second, every experience is a kind of sign. If something can have an impact, it is an experience. Peirce unpacks “impact” phenomenologically. He argues that three categories are fundamental to every experience: quality, fact, and tendency. In the abstract, he calls them Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. The Firstness of an experience is its quality: how the experience impacts us, whether simply (“blue”, “smooth”) or as a gestalt (“furious,” “sweet music,” “Donald Trump”). The Secondness of the experience is its facticity: that the experience has an impact (“I stumbled over it,” “That’s what the manuscript actually says,” “Donald tweeted this morning”). The “Thirdness” is its tendency: whither the impact moves and develops. Tendencies move from the past, through the present, to the future. They include quantum probabilities, biological tropisms, and habit formation; growing up and getting ill; embracing the demonic or seeking tikkun olam. Facts are real (Seconds), but so are qualities (Firsts) and tendencies (Thirds). If a data point exists, it is real. If a feeling is felt (be it ever so subliminal or misinterpretable), it is real. If a trend is afoot, it is real. Hopes, dreams, symbols, stories, texts, spiritualities (even “spirits”) can be as real, causative, and investigable as carbines and chromosomes. The question is, “How accurate is our naming and interpretation of these experiences?”
Because experience is all that exists, Peirce rejects dualism and embraces continuity.14 Complexity and the potential for self-direction increase from “matter” through “spirit”: from quanta and atoms, to plants and animals, to persons and social groups. Thinking shades from the vanishingly peripheral and subliminal to the focal; from sensation, to emotions, to free association; from “gut” feelings and intuitive hunches to imagination and deliberative inquiry. The simplest reactions can carry the most crucial information (“Ouch!” = “Move away quickly!”). Trace out a thought’s roots and its edges, and you will inevitably find the feelings, passions, and interests that color it. This framework accords well with biblical views of humanity. It also creates multiple points of entry for investigating and interpreting experience.
Peirce argues that every experience is also a sign: the most basic signs convey basic information (atomic, kinetic, organic) while more complex creatures handle more complex signs (feelings, emotions, habits, symbols, and thoughts). To interpret is to make signs—and to unpack those signs with yet more creations. Even to have self-consciousness is to re-present ourselves to our own minds. To reason is to generate and use signs in ever more rigorous and complex ways. Central to reason and sign making in general is the act of “abduction”—Peirce’s term for the creative “leap” or a “hunch” that connects two previously disparate signs. Induction predicts that the x+1th iteration of a certain behavior will follow the pattern that has held all these x-many times. Deduction turns signs and symbols this way and that to work out the concepts already implied. Both are essential to rigorous thinking. But abduction is the most fundamental. It is also the crown of thinking, where imagination takes flight: proposing plausible scenarios, linking disparate pieces of evidence to suggest some emerging pattern that might make actual sense. It is the key element in artistic production: the hunch that this one daub of color, or word, or movement, might transform the whole artwork and get it just “right.” Abduction allows me to move from what exists before me (or what seems to exist, or what I see through my social conditioning) toward what might be, or could be, or should be the case.
For Peirce, semiosis is triadic and continuous--you interpret something to me; that interpretation becomes a new sign; and that sign must in turn be interpreted (even if simply turned over and reexamined within my own head).15 The Continental semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure focuses on the system of symbol and signified; the Continental hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer imagines a spiral-like conversation between the text and the reader against a “horizon” of meaning. In semiotic realism however, interpretation is always a conversation with another person—even if that person is only myself. Tradition and community are continuously constructed. The self is not given, but a communicative project developed in the midst of community. The sign-making process is necessarily ethical, because there is always an “other” involved: a fellow inquirer, a target audience to share with or persuade. The process is also open-ended and expansive, because one sign must lead to another since “we have no power of thinking without signs.”16
Semiotic realism embraces a vision of inquiry which is fallible, non-foundational, and dependent on communal verification—in essence, the scientific method.
What is radical is the consistency with which Peirce would employ this method. While each field of inquiry has developed its own sets of data and standard procedures, the basic process of inquiry remains the same, whether in hard science, social science, the humanities, or everyday life. What the process requires is mental courage. Can we accept that the data (measurements, texts, testimonies) may contradict our current interpretations? Are we willing to go back to the drawing board? Do we acknowledge that reality may be much richer and more complex than our minds currently encompass?
To question a habit or time-honored belief because some new data has cast it into doubt requires courage: first the courage to “go there,” and then the courage to report what you found. To question everything at once is psychotic. Human life is constructed mainly from habit and testimony. We learn life and reason in medias res; we put faith in the testimony of parents, peers, teachers, scientists, and leaders; we stop to question when the normal order is interrupted. This is not a flaw in the reasoning process: it is the bedrock of science and humanistic inquiry. The community of fellow-inquirers may be imperfect, but their joint attention to all possible data and their joint commitment to challenging self-delusion bootstrap us toward the truth.
Semiotic Realism and Practical Theology
Semiotic realism provides a holist framework that can integrate incarnation, spirit, creativity, rigorous inquiry, the humanities, and the sciences, undercutting the non-sequiturs and hierarchies of dualism. Its vocabulary (“experience, feelings, facts, tendencies, testimony, habit, data, testing hypotheses”) can speak both to trained academics and to everyday people in the pews and the public. Its semiotic insight that thought and inquiry are forms of critical artistry can help us identify possibilities for cultivating frankness, expression, participatory democracy—even revolutionary change. I propose four semiotic realist inspired projects for liberative practical theologians to try on for size: tackling the poetics of testimony, cultivating abduction, training in artistic forms, and broaching interdisciplinary conversations.
Tackling the Poetics of Testimony
Semiotic realism invites us to consider the poetics of testimony. Powerful testimony (“I give you my word”; “I stake my life on it”; “I do solemnly swear”) can reinforce traditional logic or overturn it. Disruptive testimonies can feel threatening, even wicked. TO develops the “muscles” for expressing our testimony to other people by asking ourselves, “How do we prepare ourselves to welcome others’ testimony?”
Samara D. Madrid and Megan Boler explore how to work with testimony without generating excessive deference, excessive diffidence, or shallow empathy. Madrid argues that this is a self-emptying process.17 It requires the courage to face what Mary Boys has called intellectual and moral conversion—the decision to see and care about things in a new, more responsible way.18 When such gestalt-shifts present themselves, and when we decide to pursue them, we can begin to see, think, and do what we could not previously imagine. Boler underlines the importance of collective accountability (not just individual evaluation) in preparing learners to welcome unpleasant testimonies. To witness together is to make ourselves available to the testifier and to each other—as Boal would say, to begin the shift from spectating (consuming the experience of others) to spect-acting (committed, active solidarity).
Cultivating Abduction
Semiotic realists allow data to drive the conversation; they allow conflicting testimonies to rub up against one another; they allow cognitive dissonance to percolate and new abductions to arise. Consider a classroom where biblical literalist students are being introduced to text-, historical-, or hermeneutically critical readings of scripture. Presenting data like textual variants, apparent redactions, and grateful responses to non-traditional interpretations allows learners to come to their own conclusions at their own pace. Presenting this material as testimony rather than as conclusions allows learners the time and space to scrutinize and sort their own responses of heart, mind, and spirit to the new data. Such indirect methods of teaching are particularly valuable when resistance, anxiety, or a sense of loss of identity markers begin to dominate the learning environment.
Training in Artistic Forms
Semiotic realists are interested in teaching students or parishioners to be amateur artists by training them in a particular genre of art. This kind of training is already implicit in most university classrooms, where the skill of writing papers is central to student success. Making artistic training an explicit goal of teaching and ministry can illuminate how learning and justice-seeking really work, how flexibility and creativity are the necessary complements of tradition, rigor, and detailed attention to the facts. In addition, the kinds of formal practices which are developed in the arts can provide “containers” that lower anxiety, build trust, and strengthen group resilience. For example, TO performances provide “frames” or “maps” with “clear beginnings and endings . . . into which students can safely place their emotions.”19 Rigorous practice (whether of TO, liturgy planning, spiritual autobiography, aikido, watercolor, etc.) can create a kind of emotional “holding environment” where learners (and leaders) can develop the habits to tackle and manage anxieties without being overwhelmed by them.20
Broaching Interdisciplinary Conversations
Finally, semiotic realism invites liberationist practical theologians to move forward with greater assurance as we engage stakeholders inside and outside the academy. How would our conversations with fellow academics be different if we assumed that disciplinary differences were actually superficial? (Does it really take only one person within the conversation to transform the setting completely, if that person decides to adjust their own stance?) How would our writing be different if we ventured abductions across disciplinary boundaries? What if we began to speak of habits of thought; habits of reading and interpretation; habits of work, play, and consumption; habits of noticing and ignoring? How do we develop these habits? How do we distinguish between good habits and bad ones? How can we break and change habits?
Semiotic realism may speak to lay people in ways that other discourses cannot. Its approach to inquiry resonates with some key dimensions in the popular understanding of scientific method, while undermining dualistic thinking and scientific fundamentalism. Its appeal to creativity can resonate, liberate, and spur transformation in parishes and local communities if Boal is right to say that we are all natural-born artists.
Other Philosophical Frames
Several key themes within semiotic realism are already central to the work of practical theologians. For example, among liberationist practical theologians, embodiment and creativity play a key role as demonstrated in the work of Bonnie Miller-McLemore (the human body), Mary Fulkerson (embodiment in place and community), and Courtney Goto (play and the arts). Semiotic realism offers a framework within which these scholars might further deepen and develop their work.
Reflections on the nature of inquiry are foundational to practical theology as a field. For liberal Protestants such as Don Browning and for progressive Catholics such as Tom Groome, Gadamer’s Continental hermeneutics have been deeply influential. Semiotic realism offers an alternative theory of inquiry which can account for the development of self and tradition as well as their givenness. Semiotic realism also opens space for considering the work of divine action within hermeneutics. Are the promptings of the Holy Spirit simply a turn of phrase, or are they actually real? Perhaps all that exists is experience, and the Spirit is already within us (panentheism); perhaps all that is created is experience, and the Spirit moves us from the outside; in either case, semiotic realism takes Christian testimony seriously: God may actually be doing something when Christians engage with scripture, ritual, tradition, and moral action.
Several practical theologians have looked to alternative explorations of religion and science in order to ground their understanding of inquiry. For example, Andrew Root’s recent book Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross uses “critical realism” to ground his theological project.21 Root adopts this framework from the writings of British sociologist and philosopher Roy Bhaskar; he uses the framework to honor and open space for the truth claims of religious testimony and orthodox Christian doctrine.
From the standpoint of semiotic realism, critical realists like Root get many things right. They insist that all intellectual constructs are subject to testing and correction/invalidation; they insist that natural laws, values and spiritual experiences can be as real and investigable as physical facts; and they insist that discourses in hard science, social science, and the humanities are fundamentally commensurable. But the semiotic realist framework is also problematic. Bhaskar expounds a hierarchical epistemology where subjective experience is least real; mutually verified experience is more real; and the laws that govern experience are most real. Bhaskar also gives scant attention to creativity and the arts. Root’s critical realism inherits both of these problems. To underline God’s transcendence and otherness, Root emphasizes the discontinuities in Bhaskar’s metaphysics: human events can be “captured in toto by human epistemological forms,” but “eternal” realities cannot; the vagaries of human life are controllable, but God is beyond our “epistemological control.”22
For a semiotic realist, such dualisms muddle more than they clarify. What guarantees truthfulness is an openness to the data of experience and to the promptings of the Holy Spirit as She guides our abductions and inquiries. There is no need to protect God with invidious hierarchies; humans can image and relate to experience ad infinitum without ever plumbing the last depths of God.
The life of the body and the life of the spirit are one and the same. The world described by the sciences and the world described by theology are one and the same. But most of our intellectual frameworks are ill equipped to explain how this can be so. For practical theologians in the service of church and society, applying and exploring embodied pedagogies can be a first step toward acting our way into new ways of thinking that connect science and theology, thinking and practice, matter and spirit. TO has cleared a path toward this new way of thinking for me. My practice of TO and my search for a philosophy that can undergird it has led me to conclude that artistry is indeed the best way to describe liberationist practical theology; that semiotic realism can explain why this is the case; and that straining to connect across disciplines and across discourses can help academics, ministers, and lay people alike to expand and account for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).
NOTES
In TO, the first stage is to come to know the body in a new way; the second, to make the body expressive; and the third, to use theater as a new language for action and thought. Facilitating takes practice, but even novices can participate in (or lead) rudimentary forms in each stage. Stage 1 exercises “de-mechanize” the body/mind by bringing to conscious attention what they simultaneously loosen up: “the body and its mechanisms, its atrophies and hypertrophies, its capacities for recuperation, restructuring, reharmonization.”6 One key goal is to make bodily hexis (the way we hold our own bodies after years of inscription by class, family, church, school, work, and personal history) into the object of thoughtful reflection. A second goal is to shake up fixed ways of thinking by disrupting our fixed ways of moving. For example, in the “Hypnosis” exercise, one participant is mesmerized by a spot in the middle of the other’s hand. As the hypnotizer moves her hand, the follower maintains his facial distance and spatial orientation, and the rest of his body follows. The hypnotizer is responsible for keeping the follower safe while stretching the boundaries of “normal” movement in fun, challenging ways. After three or four minutes of gentle, creative, often silly contortion, hypnotizer and follower switch roles. Participants then describe what they noticed and how they felt.7
Participants use their newly limbered bodies to express feelings, ideas, hopes, and future visions in stage 2. One of the most basic of games is “Complete the Image”:
- Two actors silently improvise a static image by shaking hands; the observers project meanings onto the image by free association.
- One actor steps out of the image and returns with a completely different body position—thus changing the joint image entirely.
- Next, the other steps out and returns with a new position of their own—changing the joint image yet again.
- The action continues in turns.
- Finally, the observers join in on the process in groupings of twos, threes, or more (without projecting meanings).8
This game explores how one image can generate multiple meanings; it drills players in creative, improvisational problem-solving; and it vividly demonstrates how to transform a social setting simply by adjusting one’s own personal “stance.”
Stage 3 performances dissect, re-imagine, and creatively reconstruct social realities; they help participants think collectively about goals and strategies for transformation. In Image Theater, participants can interrogate, modify, and animate each other’s bodily images. In one example, a participant expresses a challenging moment by “sculpting” a handful of group members into an oppressive mise-en-scène. She uses only her gestures and her facial expressions to shape the actors’ bodies (no words). Next, the participant sculpts the same group into a scene that demonstrates the “ideal” transformation of that scenario. Finally, the onlookers engage the tableau, sculpting the individual actors into an intermediate shape—the shape of transformation, the first step toward revolutionary change. Discussion and analysis follow.9 Image Theatre fosters dialogue without depending on verbal dexterity. It delays the kind of verbal labeling that channels our thinking prematurely. It allows multiple points of view to arise, and it makes interpretation a communal project.
Forum Theater is TO’s signature genre, in which spectators become “spect-actors” and “rehearse” revolutionary change. In a classic Forum, the group develops a brief skit based on a real-life occasion of oppression. The skit is run through once: from beginning, to resistance, to ultimate failure. On the second go through, audience members can interrupt the skit’s action at any time to replace the protagonist and try their hand at overcoming the oppression. The “Joker” (TO for the “facilitator,” or as Boal would have it, the “difficultator”) acts as a critical art coach, encourages brainstorming, and helps participants weed out solutions that are “easier said than done.” An even simpler example is “Space and Territory”:
- Four chairs, side by side, all facing the audience, represent seats on the subway.
- An actor takes her place on one of the seats. Joker: “The car is crowded. All the seats are taken, except for one seat beside her, which is empty.” The Joker asks another participant to sit beside the original actor—her personal space has not been invaded.
- Joker: “Now it is 3 am, and the whole car is empty aside from our actor.” The Joker asks the same participant to sit right beside her—this time he has invaded her space.
- Joker to the original actor: “Without leaving this four seat section of the train, try to regain your personal space.”
- After one or two tries plus discussion, the Joker invites other participants to replace the original actor: “Try a different gambit to regain your personal space.”10
Liberationist practical theologians can use TO both inside and outside the classroom because it is congruent with the commitments of their field. They can use “Hypnosis” or other games to analyze power dynamics; use Image Theater to explore “church,” “marriage,” “work,” “sin,” “salvation” (as we currently know them or as we wish we could have them); use Image and Forum to explore biblical narratives (what are the thoughts and desires of the different characters?; what if they had acted differently?). They can use TO to enrich Theological Action Research or other projects of qualitative inquiry. TO starts with the wounds of experience and seeks to return there with clearer visions and better equipment. It attends to flesh, mentality, and power. It explores the disciplines, patterns, and possibilities of incarnated practice. It works to unblock the creative, interpretive process: to allow lively inquiry to flow.
The incarnational and creative dimensions of TO fit particularly well with artistic visions of practical theology. They also fit with the circle of praxis as the latter has been articulated by youth ministry theologian David White:'
- Listen to our hearts.
- Understand more deeply with our minds.
- Remember / Imagine / Tradition with our souls.
- Act with our strength.11
White’s “Circle of Discernment” is recognizably Christian. It is framed in the time-honored language of discernment and correlated with Jesus’ “Great Commandment” (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind,” Lk 10:27 NRSV / NIV). It gives equal weight to embodied affections, inquiry, imagination, and well-planned concrete interventions, taking seriously what is discovered in each of these stages.
As Maria Harris has said, the goal is to treat each discovery as a “point of departure,” remaining true to each of them as we fashion fresh faithful actions and understandings. Or to use another of Harris’s metaphors, the goal is not to trip ourselves up as we “dance” through the paces of heart, mind, tradition, and imagination, to the beat of the Spirit, among the realities of life.
Semiotic Realism
Models and metaphors like these point to an incarnational, holistic framework for doing practical theology. But they must contend with the functional dualisms that pervade much of common sense and academic discourse in the present day. Dualisms distinguish “two interrelated realities in such a way as to render their real relationship subsequently unintelligible.”12 Dualisms such as mind-soul/body, rational/emotive, objective/subjective, even male/female and science/humanities, hobble our thinking and underwrite oppressive hierarchical splits. Peirce sought to develop a coherent framework that undermines dualisms by integrating body, creativity, the spiritual, and the scientific.
Semiotic realism emphasizes the continuities between matter, nature, mind, and spirit; the process of semiosis (sign-making-and-interpretation); and the need for rigor and courage in inquiry. Its understanding of continuity is based on Peirce’s metaphysics of experience. Its understanding of semiosis is based on Peirce’s triadic analysis of the relationship between “signifier” and “signified.” And its understanding of inquiry is based on a fallibilistic, communitarian philosophy of science. Each of these elements has attracted the interest of systematic theologians.13 I encourage practical theologians to embrace the whole package.
“Experience” plays a central role in practical theology, but it is a slippery concept to nail down. Peirce proposes two radical thoughts: first, an experience is something that can have an impact; second, every experience is a kind of sign. If something can have an impact, it is an experience. Peirce unpacks “impact” phenomenologically. He argues that three categories are fundamental to every experience: quality, fact, and tendency. In the abstract, he calls them Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. The Firstness of an experience is its quality: how the experience impacts us, whether simply (“blue”, “smooth”) or as a gestalt (“furious,” “sweet music,” “Donald Trump”). The Secondness of the experience is its facticity: that the experience has an impact (“I stumbled over it,” “That’s what the manuscript actually says,” “Donald tweeted this morning”). The “Thirdness” is its tendency: whither the impact moves and develops. Tendencies move from the past, through the present, to the future. They include quantum probabilities, biological tropisms, and habit formation; growing up and getting ill; embracing the demonic or seeking tikkun olam. Facts are real (Seconds), but so are qualities (Firsts) and tendencies (Thirds). If a data point exists, it is real. If a feeling is felt (be it ever so subliminal or misinterpretable), it is real. If a trend is afoot, it is real. Hopes, dreams, symbols, stories, texts, spiritualities (even “spirits”) can be as real, causative, and investigable as carbines and chromosomes. The question is, “How accurate is our naming and interpretation of these experiences?”
Because experience is all that exists, Peirce rejects dualism and embraces continuity.14 Complexity and the potential for self-direction increase from “matter” through “spirit”: from quanta and atoms, to plants and animals, to persons and social groups. Thinking shades from the vanishingly peripheral and subliminal to the focal; from sensation, to emotions, to free association; from “gut” feelings and intuitive hunches to imagination and deliberative inquiry. The simplest reactions can carry the most crucial information (“Ouch!” = “Move away quickly!”). Trace out a thought’s roots and its edges, and you will inevitably find the feelings, passions, and interests that color it. This framework accords well with biblical views of humanity. It also creates multiple points of entry for investigating and interpreting experience.
Peirce argues that every experience is also a sign: the most basic signs convey basic information (atomic, kinetic, organic) while more complex creatures handle more complex signs (feelings, emotions, habits, symbols, and thoughts). To interpret is to make signs—and to unpack those signs with yet more creations. Even to have self-consciousness is to re-present ourselves to our own minds. To reason is to generate and use signs in ever more rigorous and complex ways. Central to reason and sign making in general is the act of “abduction”—Peirce’s term for the creative “leap” or a “hunch” that connects two previously disparate signs. Induction predicts that the x+1th iteration of a certain behavior will follow the pattern that has held all these x-many times. Deduction turns signs and symbols this way and that to work out the concepts already implied. Both are essential to rigorous thinking. But abduction is the most fundamental. It is also the crown of thinking, where imagination takes flight: proposing plausible scenarios, linking disparate pieces of evidence to suggest some emerging pattern that might make actual sense. It is the key element in artistic production: the hunch that this one daub of color, or word, or movement, might transform the whole artwork and get it just “right.” Abduction allows me to move from what exists before me (or what seems to exist, or what I see through my social conditioning) toward what might be, or could be, or should be the case.
For Peirce, semiosis is triadic and continuous--you interpret something to me; that interpretation becomes a new sign; and that sign must in turn be interpreted (even if simply turned over and reexamined within my own head).15 The Continental semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure focuses on the system of symbol and signified; the Continental hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer imagines a spiral-like conversation between the text and the reader against a “horizon” of meaning. In semiotic realism however, interpretation is always a conversation with another person—even if that person is only myself. Tradition and community are continuously constructed. The self is not given, but a communicative project developed in the midst of community. The sign-making process is necessarily ethical, because there is always an “other” involved: a fellow inquirer, a target audience to share with or persuade. The process is also open-ended and expansive, because one sign must lead to another since “we have no power of thinking without signs.”16
Semiotic realism embraces a vision of inquiry which is fallible, non-foundational, and dependent on communal verification—in essence, the scientific method.
- We encounter a sign / experience.
- We attempt to deal with it by employing a familiar thought, gambit, or hypothesis.
- If the hypothesis works, our existing thought-habits are reinforced.
- If the hypothesis does not work, our thought-habits are challenged, and we must decide what to do. Shall we initiate inquiry; shall we come up with and test a new hypothesis? Or is the challenge better ignored?
What is radical is the consistency with which Peirce would employ this method. While each field of inquiry has developed its own sets of data and standard procedures, the basic process of inquiry remains the same, whether in hard science, social science, the humanities, or everyday life. What the process requires is mental courage. Can we accept that the data (measurements, texts, testimonies) may contradict our current interpretations? Are we willing to go back to the drawing board? Do we acknowledge that reality may be much richer and more complex than our minds currently encompass?
To question a habit or time-honored belief because some new data has cast it into doubt requires courage: first the courage to “go there,” and then the courage to report what you found. To question everything at once is psychotic. Human life is constructed mainly from habit and testimony. We learn life and reason in medias res; we put faith in the testimony of parents, peers, teachers, scientists, and leaders; we stop to question when the normal order is interrupted. This is not a flaw in the reasoning process: it is the bedrock of science and humanistic inquiry. The community of fellow-inquirers may be imperfect, but their joint attention to all possible data and their joint commitment to challenging self-delusion bootstrap us toward the truth.
Semiotic Realism and Practical Theology
Semiotic realism provides a holist framework that can integrate incarnation, spirit, creativity, rigorous inquiry, the humanities, and the sciences, undercutting the non-sequiturs and hierarchies of dualism. Its vocabulary (“experience, feelings, facts, tendencies, testimony, habit, data, testing hypotheses”) can speak both to trained academics and to everyday people in the pews and the public. Its semiotic insight that thought and inquiry are forms of critical artistry can help us identify possibilities for cultivating frankness, expression, participatory democracy—even revolutionary change. I propose four semiotic realist inspired projects for liberative practical theologians to try on for size: tackling the poetics of testimony, cultivating abduction, training in artistic forms, and broaching interdisciplinary conversations.
Tackling the Poetics of Testimony
Semiotic realism invites us to consider the poetics of testimony. Powerful testimony (“I give you my word”; “I stake my life on it”; “I do solemnly swear”) can reinforce traditional logic or overturn it. Disruptive testimonies can feel threatening, even wicked. TO develops the “muscles” for expressing our testimony to other people by asking ourselves, “How do we prepare ourselves to welcome others’ testimony?”
Samara D. Madrid and Megan Boler explore how to work with testimony without generating excessive deference, excessive diffidence, or shallow empathy. Madrid argues that this is a self-emptying process.17 It requires the courage to face what Mary Boys has called intellectual and moral conversion—the decision to see and care about things in a new, more responsible way.18 When such gestalt-shifts present themselves, and when we decide to pursue them, we can begin to see, think, and do what we could not previously imagine. Boler underlines the importance of collective accountability (not just individual evaluation) in preparing learners to welcome unpleasant testimonies. To witness together is to make ourselves available to the testifier and to each other—as Boal would say, to begin the shift from spectating (consuming the experience of others) to spect-acting (committed, active solidarity).
Cultivating Abduction
Semiotic realists allow data to drive the conversation; they allow conflicting testimonies to rub up against one another; they allow cognitive dissonance to percolate and new abductions to arise. Consider a classroom where biblical literalist students are being introduced to text-, historical-, or hermeneutically critical readings of scripture. Presenting data like textual variants, apparent redactions, and grateful responses to non-traditional interpretations allows learners to come to their own conclusions at their own pace. Presenting this material as testimony rather than as conclusions allows learners the time and space to scrutinize and sort their own responses of heart, mind, and spirit to the new data. Such indirect methods of teaching are particularly valuable when resistance, anxiety, or a sense of loss of identity markers begin to dominate the learning environment.
Training in Artistic Forms
Semiotic realists are interested in teaching students or parishioners to be amateur artists by training them in a particular genre of art. This kind of training is already implicit in most university classrooms, where the skill of writing papers is central to student success. Making artistic training an explicit goal of teaching and ministry can illuminate how learning and justice-seeking really work, how flexibility and creativity are the necessary complements of tradition, rigor, and detailed attention to the facts. In addition, the kinds of formal practices which are developed in the arts can provide “containers” that lower anxiety, build trust, and strengthen group resilience. For example, TO performances provide “frames” or “maps” with “clear beginnings and endings . . . into which students can safely place their emotions.”19 Rigorous practice (whether of TO, liturgy planning, spiritual autobiography, aikido, watercolor, etc.) can create a kind of emotional “holding environment” where learners (and leaders) can develop the habits to tackle and manage anxieties without being overwhelmed by them.20
Broaching Interdisciplinary Conversations
Finally, semiotic realism invites liberationist practical theologians to move forward with greater assurance as we engage stakeholders inside and outside the academy. How would our conversations with fellow academics be different if we assumed that disciplinary differences were actually superficial? (Does it really take only one person within the conversation to transform the setting completely, if that person decides to adjust their own stance?) How would our writing be different if we ventured abductions across disciplinary boundaries? What if we began to speak of habits of thought; habits of reading and interpretation; habits of work, play, and consumption; habits of noticing and ignoring? How do we develop these habits? How do we distinguish between good habits and bad ones? How can we break and change habits?
Semiotic realism may speak to lay people in ways that other discourses cannot. Its approach to inquiry resonates with some key dimensions in the popular understanding of scientific method, while undermining dualistic thinking and scientific fundamentalism. Its appeal to creativity can resonate, liberate, and spur transformation in parishes and local communities if Boal is right to say that we are all natural-born artists.
Other Philosophical Frames
Several key themes within semiotic realism are already central to the work of practical theologians. For example, among liberationist practical theologians, embodiment and creativity play a key role as demonstrated in the work of Bonnie Miller-McLemore (the human body), Mary Fulkerson (embodiment in place and community), and Courtney Goto (play and the arts). Semiotic realism offers a framework within which these scholars might further deepen and develop their work.
Reflections on the nature of inquiry are foundational to practical theology as a field. For liberal Protestants such as Don Browning and for progressive Catholics such as Tom Groome, Gadamer’s Continental hermeneutics have been deeply influential. Semiotic realism offers an alternative theory of inquiry which can account for the development of self and tradition as well as their givenness. Semiotic realism also opens space for considering the work of divine action within hermeneutics. Are the promptings of the Holy Spirit simply a turn of phrase, or are they actually real? Perhaps all that exists is experience, and the Spirit is already within us (panentheism); perhaps all that is created is experience, and the Spirit moves us from the outside; in either case, semiotic realism takes Christian testimony seriously: God may actually be doing something when Christians engage with scripture, ritual, tradition, and moral action.
Several practical theologians have looked to alternative explorations of religion and science in order to ground their understanding of inquiry. For example, Andrew Root’s recent book Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross uses “critical realism” to ground his theological project.21 Root adopts this framework from the writings of British sociologist and philosopher Roy Bhaskar; he uses the framework to honor and open space for the truth claims of religious testimony and orthodox Christian doctrine.
From the standpoint of semiotic realism, critical realists like Root get many things right. They insist that all intellectual constructs are subject to testing and correction/invalidation; they insist that natural laws, values and spiritual experiences can be as real and investigable as physical facts; and they insist that discourses in hard science, social science, and the humanities are fundamentally commensurable. But the semiotic realist framework is also problematic. Bhaskar expounds a hierarchical epistemology where subjective experience is least real; mutually verified experience is more real; and the laws that govern experience are most real. Bhaskar also gives scant attention to creativity and the arts. Root’s critical realism inherits both of these problems. To underline God’s transcendence and otherness, Root emphasizes the discontinuities in Bhaskar’s metaphysics: human events can be “captured in toto by human epistemological forms,” but “eternal” realities cannot; the vagaries of human life are controllable, but God is beyond our “epistemological control.”22
For a semiotic realist, such dualisms muddle more than they clarify. What guarantees truthfulness is an openness to the data of experience and to the promptings of the Holy Spirit as She guides our abductions and inquiries. There is no need to protect God with invidious hierarchies; humans can image and relate to experience ad infinitum without ever plumbing the last depths of God.
The life of the body and the life of the spirit are one and the same. The world described by the sciences and the world described by theology are one and the same. But most of our intellectual frameworks are ill equipped to explain how this can be so. For practical theologians in the service of church and society, applying and exploring embodied pedagogies can be a first step toward acting our way into new ways of thinking that connect science and theology, thinking and practice, matter and spirit. TO has cleared a path toward this new way of thinking for me. My practice of TO and my search for a philosophy that can undergird it has led me to conclude that artistry is indeed the best way to describe liberationist practical theology; that semiotic realism can explain why this is the case; and that straining to connect across disciplines and across discourses can help academics, ministers, and lay people alike to expand and account for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).
NOTES
- Maria Harris, Teaching and Religious Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Rebecca Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” in Converging on Culture, Delwin Brown, et al., eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 56-70; Heather Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (London: SCM Press, 2014).
- Frances Babbage, Augusto Boal (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2004).
- John Falcone, “Peirce, Pragmatism, and Religious Education: Participating More Deeply in God’s Imagination,” Religious Education 111:4 (2016), 381-397; Donald Gelpi, SJ, The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship between Nature and Grace (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007).
- Marie-Claire Picher, “Democratic Process and the Theater of the Oppressed,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 116, (Winter 2007), 79-80.
- “Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed,” http://ptoweb.org/aboutpto/, accessed 15 August 2014; Shannon Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Toby Emert and Ellie Friedland, eds., “Come Closer”: Critical Perspectives on Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
- Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 48. Henceforth, GANA.
- Picher, 83.
- Ibid.
- Boal, GANA, 136-138, 174-217.
- Ibid., 162, 241-252.
- David White, Practicing Discernment with Youth (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2005). I add Mary Elizabeth Moore’s term “traditioning” to White’s language of “Remembering/Imagining” to suggest how discernment interprets personal / communal visions towards future hopes. Mary Elizabeth Moore, Education for Continuity and Change (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983).
- Gelpi, 4.
- E.g., Gelpi; Andrew Robinson, God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution, and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C. S. Peirce (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010); Crystal L. Downing, Changing Signs of Truth: A Christian Introduction to the Semiotics of Communication (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012); Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- Gelpi, 155. Paul Cobley, “Semeiosis,” in Paul Cobley, ed., The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 259-260; idem, “Introduction,” 3-13.
- For this paragraph, see Kenneth W. Stikkers, “Royce and Gadamer on Interpretation as the Constitution of Community,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15:1 (2001), 14-19.
- Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1-6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1935), 5.262.
- Sandra D. Madrid, “Care as Racialized, Critical, and Spiritual Emotion,” in Cynthia B. Dillard and Chinwe L. Ezueh Okpalaoka, eds., Engaging Culture, Race, and Spirituality (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2013), 81-88. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999), 175-200. Cf. Chopp.
- Mary C. Boys, “Conversion as a Foundation of Religious Education,” Religious Education 77:2 (1982), 211-224.
- Victoria Rue, Acting Religious: Theatre as Pedagogy in Religious Studies (New York, NY: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 151.
- Carol Lakey Hess, “Educating in the Spirit,” Religious Education 86:3 (1991), 383–398.
- Andrew Root, Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). Cf. Andrew Wright, Religious Education and Critical Realism: Knowledge, Reality and Religious Literacy (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016); on Critical Realism and its impact on theology, see Brad Shipway, A Critical Realist Perspective of Education (New York: Routledge, 2010).
- Root, 214, 215.