Papers by paul houston blankenship-lai
Teaching Theology and Religion, 2022
Ecclesial Practices , 2023
This article aims to crack open the structure of ethnographic theology. It challenges our Christi... more This article aims to crack open the structure of ethnographic theology. It challenges our Christian faith to nurture our love for the world, Christian and otherwise. This article is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with young adults experiencing homelessness in Seattle who claim to be Luciferians and hate Christianity. I query what difference an ethnographic theologian's personal faith makes from field to text and then back to field. What really matters about ethnographic theology, I propose, is participation in the transformative power of divine love through contemplative action that necessitates apophatic practice. I demonstrate how my own apophatic ethnographic practice(s) helped me understand what is at stake with Luciferians on the streets of Seattle and take contemplative action. I also disclose a fruit of my apophatic practice: a transformed perspective on Luciferianism where I came to experience Christ in Lucifer's wounds and the Luciferian rejection of and disgust for Christianity.
Teaching Theology & Religion , 2024
This article is about the death of a graduate school for spiritual formation and theological educ... more This article is about the death of a graduate school for spiritual formation and theological education. I ask what the death of this school can teach us about teaching theology and religion for the sake of student transformation and more loving pedagogies. I also ask how, when an institution dies, it can die beautifully. The underlying thesis of this article is that there is, alive in our classrooms (and ourselves, perhaps), a spiritual wound that can be named an experiential death of divine love-and that this wound is manifesting as unshepherded fear, rage, and discontent. I suggest that this spiritual wound be tended through skillful pedagogical tenderness, flexibility, and liberative co-creation with students to cultivate a presence of love and feed the spiritual hungers of our time. I also suggest that a school (and a teacher) dies beautifully when its death is allowed and free to become a scene of beautiful instruction.
fordham university press - land of strak contrasts, 2021
orbis, street homelessness & cathological theological ethics for the world church , 2019
on knowing humanity , 2019
Book Reviews by paul houston blankenship-lai
on knowing humanity, 2021
Current Anthropology , 2018
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Papers by paul houston blankenship-lai
Book Reviews by paul houston blankenship-lai