‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ or ‘What’s a feminist practical theologian doing amongst a bunch of distinguished philosophers?’ A riff on Professor Joe Margolis’ paper

Abstract

Rather than offer a detailed or close reading of Margolis’ paper, I ‘riff’ on some key motifs and themes from his paper from the perspective of a feminist practical theologian. I highlight affective and moral dimensions of the experience of engaging with difference, as exemplified in my own experience as a non-philosopher of engaging with a difficult philosophical text, before going on to nuance and add depth to the notion of religious diversity via multidimensional models of faith. I call on feminist and ordinary believers’ approaches to inter-religious encounter to illuminate my central concern, namely to root philosophical discourse on pluralism within lived experience, particularly the lived experience of women of faith.

Keywords:

• feminist
• practical theology
• inter-religious encounter
• difference

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Dirk-Martin Grübe for the invitation to respond to a paper that is well outside my field and my comfort zone and to Professor Margolis for a text that has stretched and challenged my understanding.

Notes

1 Weil, Waiting on God, 32–37.

2 For a more systematic development of a practical theological approach to interfaith engagement, see Gaston, “Towards a Practical Theology.”

3 For example, Williams, “The suspicion of suspicion”; Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, and Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life.

4 Cameron et al., Talking About God in Practice, 13.

5 See Graham, Transforming Practice, for a British exemplar of such an approach to practice.

6 I deliberately speak of ‘inter-religious encounter’ in favour of ‘dialogue’ in order to draw attention to the broader range of activities that ordinary believers engage in, when relating to members of other faiths, that go beyond debate and discussion, and to situate such dialogue within a social and relational context.

7 Pontifical Council on Interreligious Dialogue, “Dialogue and Proclamation,” section 3.42.

8 Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor, xii.

9 The work of feminist philosophers of religion such as Grace Jantzen comes to mind here; her life project, developed in several volumes, was to critique forms of Christian theology and practice that valorized death, violence and dualistic views of human as well as planetary life, and to develop a theology rooted in natality.

10 Fletcher, “Shifting identity,” 20.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicola Slee

Nicola Slee is Director of Research at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham, UK. A feminist practical theologian and a poet, she has wide-ranging interests and publications in the intersections between feminism, faith, liturgy, spirituality and poetry. Her most recent publications include The Faith Lives of Women and Girls: Qualitative Research Perspectives (co-edited with Fran Porter and Anne Phillips, Ashgate, 2013) and Making Nothing Happen: Five Poets Explore Spirituality (with Gavin D’Costa, Eleanor Nesbitt, Mark Pryce and Ruth Shelton, Ashgate, 2014).