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Practical theology is theology in active mode, grappling with contemporary culture........... Its central task is to propose anew the deep connectedness of the Christian theological tradition and human experience.

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Practical theology is theology in active mode, grappling with contemporary culture........... Its central task is to propose anew the deep connectedness of the Christian theological tradition and human experience.

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Talking about God in practice

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‘Doing theology’ involves participants in wrestling with life and faith questions and making sense of their place and purpose in the world. It develops a critical understanding of Christian faith and its implications for life in community and society. ‘Doing theology’ can also be a way of inviting and nurturing faith as the Holy Spirit is active through God’s word.

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‘Doing theology’ involves participants in wrestling with life and faith questions and making sense of their place and purpose in the world. It develops a critical understanding of Christian faith and its implications for life in community and society. ‘Doing theology’ can also be a way of inviting and nurturing faith as the Holy Spirit is active through God’s word.

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Connect

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SWF 2017 Overview of Theological Action Research by Susy Brouard

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Rather, researchers employing TAR consider all the material - written and unwritten, textual and practical - as (potentially) 'theology', as 'faith seeking understanding'. This means that the practices participated in and observed are themselves bearers of theology. 

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Rather, researchers employing TAR consider all the material - written and unwritten, textual and practical - as (potentially) 'theology', as 'faith seeking understanding'. This means that the practices participated in and observed are themselves bearers of theology. 

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Talking about God in practice

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Scriptures, The creeds, official church teaching

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Scriptures, The creeds, official church teaching

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The theology of theologians, dialogue with other disciplines

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The theology of theologians, dialogue with other disciplines

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The theology embedded within a group's articulation of its beliefs

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The theology embedded within a group's articulation of its beliefs

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The theology embedded within the actual practices of a group

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The theology embedded within the actual practices of a group

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For many Christians, Israel Folau has become the talisman in the fight for religious freedom.

This week, some Australian Christians rallied behind Folau's legal battle against Rugby Australia, stepping in when the rugby star's GoFundMe campaign was shut down. On its first day, the new campaign raised more than A$1 million in donations - and counting.

Some Christian leaders have urged the newly re-elected Coalition government to make religious freedom protections a priority in the wake of Folau's sacking by Rugby Australia.

There's even been talk among some conservative Coalition MPs of pushing for a " Folau Law ", or a new statute that would exempt religious beliefs from employment contracts.

Flashpoints in theology

The debate is a perfect storm of race, religion, sport, politics, sex, law and rights. But for me, neither Folau himself, nor his personal faith, are the issue.

Certainly, I find his use and interpretation of the Bible cavalier and uninformed, disturbingly indifferent to its impact, and strikingly incurious.

But beyond those issues, the question that warrants exploration is why he has so galvanised portions of the Christian community around him.

For many, it doesn't seem to matter how he's used or interpreted the Bible. They support him because he's upheld traditional Christian teaching and been prepared to take a stand on it.

Read more: After his 'miracle' election, will Scott Morrison feel pressure from Christian leaders on religious freedom?

But there seems to be another reason behind much of the support. As some Christians see it, Folau is holding the line against the dominant beliefs in contemporary Western culture on the flashpoints of gender and sexuality. And for this, some Christians especially honour him.

The question remains, though - why have these issues, and not others, have become flashpoints? There are other equally provocative biblical teachings that don't generate the same passions among Christians.

Imagine if a high-profile Christian sportsman, for instance, tweeted Jesus' teachings about how difficult it will be for the rich to enter the kingdom of God (especially if it was paraphrased as "Hell awaits you").

In this scenario, it is very easy to imagine a less fraught response from many Christians. Instead of wholeheartedly backing his stand against wealth, the athlete's Christian supporters might demur on the issue, saying how the teachings on wealth need to be "interpreted" in their context.

Some Christians don't feel the need to similarly interpret biblical references to sexuality and gender. Their meaning is taken as straightforward.

As always, sex, like money, does strange things to theology.

Shifting the line in the sand

As Simon Smart has argued, the changing cultural mores around questions of sex, gender and sexuality are at the centre of the debate over Folau's social media posts and the reaction among Christians to his sacking.

These new cultural mores are posing significant legal, doctrinal, and ethical challenges to Christian churches. For many, the identity of Christianity is at stake. The traditional line on sexuality and gender must be held - so it is said.

Read more: Why Australia needs a Religious Discrimination Act

But not all Christians see it that way. The line is not so sharply defined.

There are many other Christians who find it hard to understand how traditional teachings on sexuality and gender have been elevated to such a prominent place within some strands of Christianity.

That's not to say that these Christians automatically disregard the theological arguments for traditional stances on these issues. For instance, Christian proponents of same-sex marriage can accept there are carefully worked-out arguments against it, even if they are unpersuaded by them.

The puzzle, to many, is how these issues have become so definitive to Christian thinking. For these Christians, there's also a deep disquiet that sexuality and gender are being held up as a test case for religious freedom in Australia.

Time for a more nuanced debate

Even apart from the churches' involvement in the child sexual abuse scandals, the public's perception of Christianity has been deeply affected by the church's frequently moralistic stance on sexuality. This often obscures the other important themes of Christianity - love, hope and compassion as they are embodied in the example of Jesus.

A 2017 McCrindle survey found that the church's objection to homosexuality was the biggest obstacle preventing people from becoming more religious in Australia, much more so than the role of women in Christianity and the debate over science and evolution.

It's worth comparing the current angst over sexuality with the long-running debate in the church over science and evolution.

There was a similar line-in-the-sand reaction (and there still is) by some Christians to the theory of evolution. But the willingness of many Christians to navigate that debate with care and informed theological reflection has produced deeper understandings of Christianity, especially its doctrine of creation.

Read more: Is there a place for religion in the science classroom?

So why hasn't the same thing happened in the debate over sex, gender and sexuality?

For one, the fault lines around these issues within Christianity are complex. There aren't simple divisions between "conservative" and "progressive" versions of Christianity, or between those who read the bible "literally" and those who read it "metaphorically."

There are deeper underlying differences between Christians over the extent to which Christianity can be open to exploring new forms of itself while staying true to its founding message. Recognising this would involve a serious discussion of the diverse theological meanings of tradition, culture and ethics.

But if we're able to have this deeper discussion within Christianity, it could affect how we view those "lines in the sand" between the church and broader society - and whether religious freedoms are truly at stake. And the world at large might get better insights into the breadth of contemporary Christianity.

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Why Christians disagree over the Israel Folau saga

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For many Christians, Israel Folau has become the talisman in the fight for religious freedom. This week, some Australian Christians rallied behind Folau's legal battle against Rugby Australia, stepping in when the rugby star's GoFundMe campaign was shut down. On its first day, the new campaign raised more than A$1 million in donations - and counting.

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Opportunities for reflection and refinement of personal beliefs, values and life choices, and application of knowledge and understanding to the breadth of life – intellectual, emotional, personal, relational, spiritual – challenge [us] to consider the role and contribution [we]can make towards creating a more just, harmonious and compassionate world.  CSCF

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Opportunities for reflection and refinement of personal beliefs, values and life choices, and application of knowledge and understanding to the breadth of life – intellectual, emotional, personal, relational, spiritual – challenge [us] to consider the role and contribution [we]can make towards creating a more just, harmonious and compassionate world.  CSCF

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Staff and students are mentored to:• become articulate, empathic and discerning members of their communities• listen to and identify the issues underlying discussion• enter into open, respectful dialogue with people whose religious, philosophical, ethical views are different• present an informed, well-defended personal position The processes of inquiry, discussion and reflection underpin the acquisition of those qualities and skills. CSCF

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Staff and students are mentored to:• become articulate, empathic and discerning members of their communities• listen to and identify the issues underlying discussion• enter into open, respectful dialogue with people whose religious, philosophical, ethical views are different• present an informed, well-defended personal position The processes of inquiry, discussion and reflection underpin the acquisition of those qualities and skills. CSCF

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"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." As a kid, I would read these first words in my children's Bible over and over again-not because I found them particularly interesting, but because I was the kind of person who always started books from the beginning, and I could never seem to get any further into the Bible than Noah and the ark before I lost interest.

I also liked the first story in my Bible because it had some of the best illustrations. On one page was a friendly orange sun, and on the opposite page a shining yellow moon and twinkling stars. Next came an ocean with big waves, across from a page depicting mountains and forests. Even in a children's Bible the distinctions God made when creating the universe were obvious. Each bit of the world was broken into pairs and opposites. For a kid who liked order and organization, the story of creation in Genesis 1 was just about perfect. There was a place for everything, and everything was in its place.

This kind of structure in scripture was something that I appreciated up until my teen years, when I began to get a sense of the way life sometimes falls outside black-and-white categories. Biologically, I learned that the world isn't separated distinctly into land or sea; there are also marshes, estuaries, and coral reefs. Personally, I began to figure out more about my own sense of gender identity, and I wondered if all people were really divided into male and female, as Genesis 1 seemed to say they were.

Because the ancient Israelites tended to separate their world into binaries (take a look at the kashrut laws that govern acceptable and unacceptable foods, for instance), it's not surprising that Genesis 1:27 breaks humans into two groups as well-male and female. But I've also concluded that this verse does not discredit other sexes or genders, any more than the verse about the separation of day from night rejects the existence of dawn and dusk, or the separation of land from sea rejects the existence of marshes and estuaries.

United Methodist deacon M Barclay, who identifies as neither male nor female but as nonbinary, puts it this way: "This chapter talks about night and day and land and water, but we have dusk and we have marshes. These verses don't mean 'there's only land and water, and there's nowhere where these two meet.' These binaries aren't meant to speak to all of reality-they invite us into thinking about everything between and beyond."

Just as we call God the Alpha and the Omega, implying all things from first to last and in between, the author of Genesis 1 is using a poetic device to corral the infinite diversity of creation into categories we can easily understand.

For as long as there have been humans, there have been people who fall outside of the male/female binary. A creation story from Sumer, a Mesopotamian society and neighbor to what would become Israel, has references from 1600 BCE to humans who are created with sex organs that are not immediately identifiable as female or male. The Mishnah and the Talmud, the Jewish compilations of law put together between 200 CE and 500 CE, include examples of individuals who don't fit male or female categories, including those whose sex is indeterminable, those who have characteristics of more than one sex, and those whose characteristics change over time. This tells us that even the descendants of the people who recorded Genesis 1 did not necessarily assume that the gender or sex categories seen in verse 27 were all-encompassing.

In Greek and Roman times, people born with indeterminate or ambiguous sex characteristics were called hermaphrodites, after a Greek god who exhibited both male and female traits. Today people with a combination of different sex characteristics identify themselves as intersex, and they make up between .018 percent and 1.7 percent of the world's population. Throughout history, doctors have attempted to "fix" intersex infants through surgical intervention before a child can make any decisions, and sometimes even without the knowledge or consent of the parents.

Fortunately, intersex advocates all over the world are finally seeing the results of their push for self-determination. Groups like the Intersex Society of North America are helping stop the modification of babies identified as intersex at birth. The interactions between chromosomes, hormone production, and physiology are much more complicated than we once thought. Not all people are born male or female; if we try to enforce that binary, we put ourselves in the position of claiming to know better than God and better than the individual themself. Indeed, as theologian and specialist on intersex issues Megan DeFranza puts it, "The simplistic binary [sex] model is no longer sufficient. It is dishonest to the diversity of persons created in the image of God."

When we attempt to box God's creation in by looking to Genesis 1:27 and expecting every person on earth to fall into line, we're asking the text the wrong question. If Genesis 1 was meant to describe the world as it is, the biblical authors would have needed a scroll hundreds of feet long. Thank goodness we don't have to slog through verse after verse that reads like a biology textbook on taxonomy, naming creature after creature from the elephant down to the paramecium. Just as we wouldn't expect astronomers to cram things like comets and black holes into the categories of sun or moon, we shouldn't expect all humans to fit into the categories of male and female. Instead of asking the text to define and label all that is, we can ask God to speak into the space between the words, between biblical times and our time, and between categories we see as opposites.

When I asked Barclay if they identified with the concept of in-between places in space and time, their answer surprised me. I had always assumed that nonbinary people identified themselves as somewhere between male and female. But Barclay said, "To say that you're nonbinary innately suggests there is a binary, and my whole point is that there's no such thing. We've created this formula and forced our understanding of gender into it." Instead of seeing themselves as halfway between male and female, Barclay and many other nonbinary people identify as something completely different.

"I'm very convicted to speak about my own nonbinary identity not as an 'in-between,' but as a 'more,'" they told me. "So, for instance, as someone who's bisexual, I don't think of myself as half gay and half straight. I'm something else. I know some nonbinary people think of themselves as half man and half woman, but I don't. When we open the [gender binary] boxes, it's much more a scattering of things than a line."

Since noted sexologist Alfred Kinsey began publishing his reports on sexuality in 1948, people in the Western world have become more aware of sexuality as existing along a spectrum, with points all along it from A to Z-or F to M, as it were.

But charting our identities along a line in two dimensions has its limitations; namely, it doesn't accurately reflect human diversity. We don't see each other, or ourselves, in only two dimensions. Bisexual and nonbinary advocates are suggesting that it's long past time to update our ideology. Perhaps, instead of insisting that each person can be charted along a line, we should be looking up and seeing that the multitude of sexualities and gender identities exist in 3-D, sprinkled through space like the stars.

This expansion in our understanding of the world also opens the door to a new reverence for God's creation. In acknowledging when we've misunderstood something about the world, and changing our theories and behavior in response, we're admitting our humanity and humbling ourselves before the Creator. In the same way, when we recognize that our language doesn't accurately represent what is, we create new words to illustrate those concepts.

"Once I said I was not a cisgender woman, the response was, 'Oh, you must feel really masculine.' But masculinity is not something that I feel represents who I am either," Barclay said. "Our language for masculinity and femininity represents our reliance on the idea of a binary. I desperately want a third word, because I don't feel like a masculine person and I don't feel like a feminine person. I desperately wish there were more words for naming our different ways of being in the world."

Genesis 1:27 doesn't give us any new words to help us understand the reality of human gender, but it does provide us with a theological concept. We are told that humans are made in the image of God-the imago Dei. Because the creation of male and female is mentioned almost in the same breath as the image of God, many people have wondered if the two are somehow related. Which part of us reflects the image of God? Might it have anything to do with our sex or our gender?

Scholars throughout history have come to different conclusions regarding this question. One group of thinkers believes that we reflect the image of God through a nonphysical characteristic, like our ability to reason. A second group believes that God's image is stamped on us in a bodily sense: through our gender, the shape of our bodies, or even the way we walk on two legs. A third group sees the image of God as something relational, which affects the way humans relate to God and to the rest of creation.

Some scholars who have suggested that the image of God is represented in our physical sex think that this image is most fully realized when a cisgender man and a cisgender woman join together in marriage, essentially putting back together something that had been separated. Others, like theologian James Brownson, disagree: "The fact that male and female are both created in the divine image is intended to convey the value, dominion, and relationality shared by both men and women, but not the idea that the complementarity of the genders is somehow necessary to fully express or embody the divine image."

Near the end of his survey of the imago Dei, Karl Barth concluded, "The passage Gen. 1:26-31 does not seem to pay any more attention to the body of man than it does to his soul or intellectual and spiritual nature." Indeed, it would have been strange for the ancient Hebrew people to think of a human as something broken up into mind, body, and soul, as we do today. This sort of thinking is a product of Greek philosophy and wouldn't have existed at the time Genesis 1 was written.

Hebrew Bible scholar Claus Westermann puts it this way: "The discussion whether the image and likeness of God referred to the corporeal or the spiritual aspect of the person has brought us to the conclusion that the question has been placed incorrectly." Instead, he says, this verse "is concerned neither with the corporeal nor with the spiritual qualities of people; it is concerned only with the person as a whole."

For Barclay, living as a reflection of God's image is possible only when you're living as a whole person-authentically and without certain sections severed or hidden. When I asked Barclay if they subscribe to any specific theory about the imago Dei, they introduced me to the reformer John Wesley's sermons on the subject. "I love John Wesley's approach to the image of God. For him it's about relational capabilities, not about a single innate characteristic."

Wesley preached that people were made in God's natural image ("a spiritual being, endued with understanding, freedom of will, and various affections"); in God's political image ("the governor of this lower world, having dominion over the fishes of the sea, and over all the earth"); and in God's moral image ("in righteousness and true holiness" and "full of love"). He believed this was our default way of being before the fall, and people are still able to live into these characteristics with God's help.

For Barclay, the possibility of living into the moral image of God is most striking. "Wesley uses a breath image and says that we breathe in the compassion, generosity, and the love of God, and we should be exhaling the same thing to others. So it's all about how we orient ourselves toward each other and toward creation."

We can't be in right relationship to each other if we can't see each other. We can't be fully present in any relationship if we're walling off part of ourselves or hiding beneath a mask.

"It's really hard to be your best self when you're in a cage," Barclay said. They began to tell me about their experiences in seminary before coming out as nonbinary. "I would find myself getting mad at people for using 'she/her/hers' pronouns for me, which wasn't fair at all, because they didn't know! I was inhibiting my relationships in order to stay safe. My relationships with others were inhibited, my relationship to myself was deeply inhibited, my relationship to my community was inhibited. I was limited in my ability to live into the image of God within myself."

After Barclay came out, things started to change. Rather than trying to conform to the current sociological expectations of men and women, Barclay began to express themself in ways that accurately reflected who they were. They began deconstructing the walls they had built and the masks they had put on, and they took a leap of faith. They allowed others to see what God had always seen.

So how is God's image manifested in our bodies? In the same way that it's manifested in the rest of our being. The image of God was not given to humankind in bits and pieces, with some living in your left arm and another bit in your soul and another bit in your ability to argue and reason. It is a gift that resonates throughout all that we are, like the deep tones of a bell rung far away. It awakens us and moves us forward toward God and toward each other.

As we talked, Barclay and I agreed that it would be impossible to try to live into the image of God that we bear while also trying to deny our gender identity. We have to say yes to who God created us to be before we can begin imaging God in the world. The one has to come before the other, because otherwise our own defenses get in the way.

When I asked Barclay how they explained the relationship between this big theological concept and their own gender, they thought for a minute and said: "My trans-ness is only related to the image of God in me inasmuch as it allows me to naturally, politically, and morally be in right relationship with myself, with my community, and with creation as a whole. It has nothing to do with it and everything to do with it."

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title "God's unclassified world." It was excerpted from Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians. © 2018 Austen Hartke. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.

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God also made dusk, marshes, and nonbinary gender

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"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." As a kid, I would read these first words in my children's Bible over and over again-not because I found them particularly interesting, but because I was the kind of person who always started books from the beginning, and I could never seem to get any further into the Bible than Noah and the ark before I lost interest.

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Responding to Our Cultural Situation

"Understanding our culture and Christianity's relationship to it can only be approached from inside our particular lived situation. Our challenge is not a theoretical one, how to reconcile the idea of Christianity with some theory of culture, but a practical one, how to respond to our particular situation in a way that is consistent with what we know about God's purposes. We must discover how in practice God's presence 'works' in our cultural situation."

+ William Dyrness, professor of theology and culture, in his book The Earth Is God's: A Theology of American Culture. Responding to "our particular lived situation" informs Fuller's classes on campus and at immersion courses at such cultural sites as New York City. Interpreting the many messages of Times Square (pictured above, from the New York City immersion course) is not unlike interpreting popular culture-messages to engage both theologically and practically. Learn more about Fuller's immersion courses here.

"If theology and the Christian faith is going to be intelligible or make sense to anyone in the modern world, it really has to come from a place of being conversant with culture. We need to honor and respect the things we're engaged in dialogue with just as if it were a person sitting across a coffee table from us. One of the challenges for evangelical Christians is that we're not very good at being conversationalists. We tend to speak before we listen, and when we do that, we're not actually hearing what the culture is saying."

+ Kutter Callaway, professor of theology and culture, from Watching TV Religiously: Television and Theology in Dialogue. Callaway is pictured here in conversation with actor Morgan Freeman, as part of a television series that aired earlier this year on the National Geographic Channel. Watch the episode here. Listen to Kutter and screenwriter Dean Batali discuss television and theology in their podcast Televisual Theology.

"We need a hermeneutic that includes not only Scripture and the tradition of the church but also cultural receptivity and human experience. . . . Not only can Scripture provide an interpretive grid for our experiences, but our experiences can also become the 'spectacles' through which we reread the Scriptures and church tradition, looking for insight from God's Word that might provide further interpretation and illumination and vice versa."
+ + Barbara Buck, associate pastor at St. Peter's by the Sea Presbyterian Church, joined the Brehm Center's immersion course at the South by Southwest Music Festival. Learn more about this immersion course here.
Robert K. Johnston, professor of theology and culture and director of the Brehm Center's Reel Spirituality film initiative, from his book God's Wider Presence: Reconsidering General Revelation. Above: a scene from Fuller's immersion course at the Sundance Film Festival. Learn more about immersion courses here.

A Theology of Popular Culture

"Popular culture . . . is the main site for the exchange of ideas in contemporary culture, and it serves as the lingua franca of the postmodern world-if you can't speak pop, there's a chance your ideas won't be heard."

+ Barry Taylor, the Brehm Center's Artist-in-Residence, in his book Entertainment Theology: New-Edge Spirituality in a Digital Democracy. Pictured: Taylor spray paints a graffiti art installation at the music and technology festival South by Southwest. Voices from the Fuller community in this section engage popular culture as a "site for the exchange of ideas" from a variety of perspectives.

FASHION + THEOLOGY
"As the recent controversy of France's relationship with Muslim head-coverings has demonstrated, fashion is the carrier of deeply political, social and religious intertextuality. For theologians to detach themselves from an awareness of the symbolic power and cultural import of this multibillion-dollar industry is to develop a language game removed from the real world." + Robert Covolo [PhD student], from an essay on the theology of fashion, available here.

TELEVISION + DISCERNMENT
"In video matters, the children of light must be skilled. Since TV will remain a mixture of good and evil until the end of time, the righteous must dig in for a long struggle. . . . Therefore, in all TV interests, one must cultivate a wholesome tension. An optimism about the righteousness of the cause ought always to be tempered with a pessimism of redeeming history through such a means. Any state other than inner frustration may lead to either left or right wing extremes. These are critical times."+ Edward Carnell, Fuller's second president (1954-1959), in his book Television: Slave or Master?, a reflection on engaging media-written long before the Internet-that continues to reflect Fuller's approach to culture today.

POP CULTURE + WORSHIP
"Many types of nonmodern forms of worship-be they contemplative or meditative; featuring drums, Celtic, or Taizé music; with candles, food, or showing digital media-are embraced in post Christendom churches. God created all of reality, and the task of the people of God, as God's agents, is to offer all of reality back to him in worship."+ Ryan Bolger, associate professor of church in contemporary culture, in his book The Gospel after Christendom: New Voices, New Cultures, New Expressions.

SPORTS + PSYCHOLOGY
"Humans are amazing in their ability to be challenged and face obstacles and rise above them. But the consequence can be that as you experience this excitement and realize that you're excelling, as people pat you on the back and praise you, you can start to trick yourself into thinking that 'I am worth something when I perform. I am worth something when I win, and I'm only worth something when I perform and I win.'"+ Ben Houltberg, associate professor of human development, in a lecture to athletes about negotiating performance-based identity.

STAR WARS + JUSTICE
"Unlike Han Solo, who is looking to leave the rebels and cowers from leadership in an effort to save himself, Luke is eagerly and courageously reborn into a time when the galaxy desperately needs the possibility of what he can become. . . . In this time of rampant egocentrism, in the midst of desperate need and with the world waiting for us to be born, may we act upon the power and command of our spiritual rebirth, may we be born for others and may we be born into action."+ Roslyn Hernandez [MDiv student], writing for Think Christian on Star Wars and Walter Brueggemann's theology of justice.

HIP-HOP + THEOLOGY
"Many hip-hop artists are searching for a God that thinks like they think, that walks like they walk. But a God that smokes like we smoke? You want a blunt-smoking Jesus? That is not a theology-that is the catechism of the irreverent. Still, within that irreverency is something deeper at work. This is an attempt to make God more accessible to those who have been oppressed and who have only seen one symbol of who Jesus is. Hip-hop says, 'we're gonna find this element, and we're going to do so on our own grounds.'"+ Daniel White Hodge [PhD '07], in an interview with Brehm Center Program Director Nate Risdon, available here.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT + MORAL DEVELOPMENT
"There has been an abundance of research examining video games as a potential cause of antisocial or violent behaviors. But is the opposite also true? Is it possible that video games can be a gateway to positive moral transformations and enhanced spiritual consciousness? What are some ways we might go about measuring and assessing gameplay effects on moral development?"+ Ryan Hornbeck, a postdoctoral researcher with the School of Psychology's Thrive Center, from his ethnography of players in World of Warcraft, an online video game. Watch his presentation here.

POP MUSIC + PROPHECY
"A deep theology of Love needs a new fresh articulation in our time in a similar way that Jürgen Moltmann renewed a generation's call to find anew a theology of Hope. What artists like Macklemore are doing is what the early followers of God did: looked in the hedgerows and alleyways for those who want to come to the banqueting table and offer them a seat."+ Jeff Keuss, writing for Christ & Cascadia, on the role of rap artist Macklemore in prophetically naming injustices in the world.

SUPERHEROES + MYTHOLOGY
"Cultural 'texts' function religiously, so it is important to consider the extent to which this is the case. If we add the fact that culture lays in the background of faith commitment more than is realized, then the boundaries between religion and culture become incredibly blurred. Pop culture [like superheroes] is so often transformative for people, eliciting emotional responses on par with those elicited by religious music or sermons or spiritually intense moments."+ Anthony Mills [PhD '11], on the blog PopTheology.com. Read more in his book American Theology, Superhero Comics, and Cinema: The Marvel of Stan Lee and the Revolution of a Genre.

CELEBRITY + OBJECTIFICATION
"Celebrity culture hurts both the celebrity and the crowd. It dehumanizes the celebrity into a consumable good instead of a fellow human being, and it strips the crowd of the dignity to think for ourselves since loyalty to a brand demands the crowd to consume the product without discretion. I lament that we are entangled in this web that weaves faithful Christian living and celebrity culture."+ Alum Cindy Brandt [MAT '03], reflecting on the negative effects of celebrity culture. Read more here.

CRAFT BEER + COMMUNITY
"Beer is a wonderful catalyst towards community. I'd even argue that beer shows us something of God's intentions for us. This is especially relevant for those of us in Cascadia. The brewing and drinking of high quality beer (and wine and liquor) has seeped into the culture of Cascadia. Our love for fine drinks, and the celebration that accompanies them, give us a grand glimpse of the wedding feast in the world to come, the celebration of Christ and his bride, the church."+ David Arinder, writing for Christ & Cascadia, on the eschatological significance of craft beer culture in the Pacific Northwest.

SPORTS STADIUM + LITURGY
"Sunday evening at the CenturyLink field is the largest and most significant liturgical event in the life of Seattle. . . . The stadium experience appears to indicate that Cascadians long to worship and that they long for community and connection. They long for stories and heroes, songs and rituals. They long to raise their hands, hearts, and voices. They long to be a part of some larger story, some larger experience, relationship, or spectacle."+ Matthew Kaemingk, director of the Fuller Institute for Theology and Northwest Culture, on fan culture and the Seattle Seahawks. Read more here.

Finding Christ in Cultural Tension

"The authentic Christ is in tension. It's not just in tension between Western faith and Eastern culture; it's tension between anything. It could be between Republicans and Democrats, between socialism and capitalism, it can be between mercy and justice. It's in that tension that the authentic Christ appears."

+ Graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang (quoted above), keynote speaker at the Asian American Center's Altered Egos Conference, spoke on American comics, Asian stereotypes, and the importance of representation. Rather than choosing one culture or the other, Yang suggests a balanced approach he ultimately finds in Christ himself. Watch his lecture and more here. Pictured above: an image from his award-winning graphic novel American Born Chinese.

+ The Altered Egos Conference, a two-day event put on by Fuller's Asian American Center, gathered culture-makers, artists, and writers to consider the importance of representation in pop culture and Asian American identity. Program Director Daniel Lee (pictured left) reflected: "It's a common theological fallacy to think that our Christian identities replace our racial/ethnic identities as though we can be some neutral abstract persons in Christ. When this misunderstanding is abetted by the lack of representation and misrepresentation of Asian Americans in pop culture, it can lead to many Asian Americans hiding the 'Asian' parts of their identity. Asian Americanness becomes their hidden altered ego. This conference explored how recovering one's Asian American identity can become a source of creativity, insight, and strength for Christian discipleship and calling." Read more from Daniel at the conference's co-sponsor Inheritance Magazine.

"Both in times of tremendous exuberance and in times of my deepest sorrow, I have found art to be a welcome companion on the journey of faith. There are works of art-songs, books, movies, paintings-that serve as significant markers in my life thus far. Haven't we all got that list of deeply meaningful works of art that we find some deep emotional connection with?"

+ Nate Risdon, associate director of the Brehm Center, from an interview on faith, art, and leadership on Faith & Leadership. Pictured above: Nate (far right) walks with immersion course participants through the streets of Austin, Texas, at the South by Southwest music festival.

Further Reading

Available Classes

Theology and Contemporary Literature with Robert Johnston
Theology and Culture with Bill Dyrness (and other faculty)
Theology and Media Culture with Barry Taylor
Theology and Pop Culture with Barry Taylor
Theology and Film with Robert Johnston (and other faculty)
Theology and Theatre with Todd Johnson
Theology, Film, and Culture: Engaging Independent Films with Kutter Callaway
Understanding Popular Music: South by Southwest with Barry Taylor and Nate Risdon

Asian American, Culture Care, Theology and Art, Theology and Culture

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"Understanding our culture and Christianity's relationship to it can only be approached from inside our particular lived situation. Our challenge is not a theoretical one, how to reconcile the idea of Christianity with some theory of culture, but a practical one, how to respond to our particular situation in a way that is consistent with what we know about God's purposes.

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Picking up the newspaper is an invitation to an emotional joyride. Last weekend in Austin, for example, the news that the Longhorns had beaten Nebraska led to a collective whoop of joy. Most of the emotions you get from the newspaper are less pleasant, though. News reports about the planning of the attacks in Mumbai, for example, can lead to anger. Reports about child prostitution rings can lead to disgust.

Disgust is the emotion that I want to talk about today.

Current theories suggest that we have to distinguish between affect and emotion. Affect is the feelings that you experience in different situations. As you start to read a harrowing story about child prostitution, you may get a pit in your stomach or feel a bit light-headed. Emotion occurs after you determine the cause of the feelings you are having. This process of finding the causes is called appraisal. So, feeling disgust after reading a news story requires appraising that your ill feeling is being caused by disgust for the events described in the story.

This view of disgust suggests that the emotion of disgust is strongly connected to our sense of morality. That is, when we feel disgust, we should also express feelings of moral outrage. And to counteract those emotions, we should increase our concern with purity.

A paper by E.J. Horberg, Christopher Oveis, Dacher Keltner, and Adam Cohen in the December, 2009 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at this issue.

First, they looked at the difference between disgust and anger. They had people read about relatively minor violations of purity and violations of justice. A violation of purity might be a story about a brother and sister who like to kiss passionately when nobody is around. A violation of justice might be a person who steals books from the library that other people need to study. People judged how wrong they felt that these violations were. People also rated how angry and disgusted they were feeling. The amount of disgust people were feeling was related to the strength of their ratings of the wrongness of the purity violations. The amount of anger people were feeling was related to the strength of their ratings of the wrongness of the justice violations.

Another study in this series looked at the causal relationship between disgust and moral sense. In this study, people watched a video. For some people, the video was disgusting (the scene from the movie Trainspotting in which the main character has to reach through a toilet filled with feces). For other people, the video was designed to generate sadness (a scene in which a child watches a father's death).

After seeing these videos, people read about a variety of violations of purity and justice (like those I just described). The people who watched the disgusting video found the violations of purity to be much more wrong than the people who watched the sadness video. Neither of these videos had much impact at all on people's judgments of the wrongness of violations of justice.

These studies suggest that there is a tight relationship between our sense of moral purity and the emotion of disgust. Violations of our sense of moral purity lead us to feel the emotion of disgust. When we experience the emotion of disgust, we also change our judgments of the moral purity of others.

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Picking up the newspaper is an invitation to an emotional joyride. Last weekend in Austin, for example, the news that the Longhorns had beaten Nebraska led to a collective whoop of joy. Most of the emotions you get from the newspaper are less pleasant, though.

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From politics to commerce to sex, the "forgotten emotion" of disgust can affect you in subtle ways

Take the test&colon; " How easily disgusted are you? "

DAVID PIZARRO can change the way you think, and all he needs is a small vial of liquid. You simply have to smell it. The psychologist spent many weeks tracking down the perfect aroma. It had to be just right. "Not too powerful," he explains. "And it had to smell of real farts."

It's no joke. Pizarro needed a suitable fart spray for an experiment to investigate whether a whiff of something disgusting can influence people's judgements.

His experiment, together with a growing body of research, has revealed the profound power of disgust, showing that this emotion is a much more potent trigger for our behaviour and choices than we ever thought. The results play out in all sorts of unexpected areas, such as politics, the judicial system and our spending habits. The triggers also affect some people far more than others, and often without their knowledge. Disgust, once dubbed "the forgotten emotion of psychiatry", is showing its true colours.

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Disgust is experienced by all humans, typically accompanied by a puckered-lipped facial expression. It is well established that it evolved to protect us from illness and death. "Before we had developed any theory of disease, disgust prevented us from contagion," says Pizarro, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The sense of revulsion makes us shy away from biologically harmful things like vomit, faeces, rotting meat and, to a certain extent, insects.

Disgust's remit broadened when we became a supersocial species. After all, other humans are all potential disease-carriers, says Valerie Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "We've got to be very careful about our contact with others; we've got to mitigate those disease-transfer risks," she says. Disgust is the mechanism for doing this - causing us to shun people who violate the social conventions linked to disgust, or those we think, rightly or wrongly, are carriers of disease. As such, disgust is probably an essential characteristic for thriving on a cooperative, crowded planet.

Yet the idea that disgust plays a deeper role in people's everyday behaviour emerged only recently. It began when researchers decided to investigate the interplay between disgust and morality. One of the first was psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who in 2001 published a landmark paper proposing that instinctive gut feelings, rather than logical reasoning, govern our judgements of right and wrong.

Haidt and colleagues went on to demonstrate that a subliminal sense of disgust - induced by hypnosis - increased the severity of people's moral judgements about shoplifting or political bribery, for example (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 780). Since then, a number of studies have illustrated the unexpected ways in which disgust can influence our notions of right and wrong.

In 2008, Simone Schnall, now at the University of Cambridge, showed that placing people in a room with an unacknowledged aroma of fart spray and a filthy desk increased the severity of their moral judgements about, say, whether it's OK to eat your dead pet dog (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 1096) "One would think that one makes decisions about whether a behaviour is right or wrong by considering the pros and cons and arriving at a balanced judgement. We showed this wasn't the case," says Schnall.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, to find that the more "disgustable" you are, the more likely you are to be politically conservative, says Pizarro, who has studied this correlation. Similarly, the more conservative that people are, the harsher their moral judgements become in the presence of disgust stimuli.

Together, these findings raise all sorts of interesting, and troubling, questions about people's prejudices, and the ways in which they might be influenced or even deliberately manipulated. Humanity already has a track record of using disgust as a weapon against "outsiders" - lower castes, immigrants and homosexuals. Nazi propaganda notoriously depicted Jewish people as filthy rats.

Now there is empirical evidence that inducing disgust can cause people to shun certain minority groups - at least temporarily. That's what Pizarro acquired his fart spray to explore. Along with Yoel Inbar of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and colleagues, he primed a room with the foul-smelling spray, then invited people in to complete a questionnaire, asking them to rate their feelings of warmth towards various social groups, such as the elderly or homosexuals. The researchers didn't mention the pong to the participants, who were a mix of heterosexual male and female US college students.

Reeking of prejudice

While the whiff did not influence people's feelings towards many social groups, one effect was stark&colon; those in the smelly room, on average, felt less warmth towards homosexual men compared to participants in a non-smelly room. The effect was of equal strength among political liberals and conservatives (Emotion, vol 12, p 23). This finding is consistent with previous studies showing that a stronger susceptibility to disgust is linked with disapproval of gay people.

In another experiment, making western people feel more vulnerable to disease - by showing pictures of different pathogens - made them view foreign groups, such as Nigerian immigrants, less favourably (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol 7, p 333).

"It's not that I think we could change liberals to conservatives by grossing them out, but sometimes all you need is a temporary little boost," says Pizarro. He points out that if there happened to be disgust triggers in or around a polling station, for example, it could in principle sway undecided voters to a more conservative decision. "Subtle influences in places where you're voting might actually have an effect."

To an extent, many politicians have already come to the same conclusions about disgust's ability to sway the views of their electorates. In April this year, Republicans made hay of a story about President Barack Obama eating dog meat as a boy, which was recounted in his memoir. The criticism of Obama might have seemed like the typical, if surreal, electioneering you would expect in the run-up to a presidential election, but the psychology of disgust suggests that it would have struck deeper with many voters than the Democrats might have realised.

Other politicians have gone further when employing disgust to win votes. Ahead of the primaries for the 2010 gubernatorial election in New York state, candidate Carl Paladino of the Tea Party sent out thousands of flyers impregnated with the smell of rotten garbage, with a message to "get rid of the stink" alongside pictures of his rivals. While Paladino didn't manage to beat his Democrat opponent in the race to be governor, some political analysts believe his bold tactics and smelly flyers helped him thrash rivals to win the Republican nomination against the odds.

At the same time as the role that disgust plays in politics was emerging, others were searching for its effects in yet more realms of life. Given that disgust influences judgements of right and wrong, it made sense to look to the legal system.

Sometimes disgust is arguably among the main reasons that a society chooses to deem an act illegal - necrophilia, some forms of pornography, or sex between men, for example. In court, disgusting crimes can attract harsher penalties. For example, in some US states, the death penalty is sought for murders with an "outrageously or wantonly vile" element.

Research led by Sophieke Russell at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, holds important lessons about how juries arrive at decisions of guilt and sentencing - and possible pointers for achieving genuine justice in courts. She showed that once people feel a sense of disgust, it is difficult for them to take into account mitigating factors important in the process of law, such as the intentions of the people involved in a case. Disgust also clouds a juror's judgement more than feelings of anger.

"Once jurors feel a sense of disgust, it is difficult for them to take into account mitigating factors important in a case, such as the intentions of those involved"

It is for these reasons that philosopher Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago Law School has argued strongly to stop using the "politics of disgust" as a basis for legal judgements. She argues instead for John Stuart Mill's principle of harm, whereby crimes are judged solely on the basis of the harm they cause. It is a contentious view. Others, such as Dan Kahan of Yale Law School, argue that "it would certainly be a mistake - a horrible one - to accept the guidance of disgust uncritically. But it would be just as big an error to discount it in all contexts." Besides, disgust could never be eliminated from trials, because this would mean never exposing the jury to descriptions of crimes or pictures of crime scenes.

Beyond the courtroom, psychologists searching for disgust's influence have found it in various everyday scenarios. Take financial transactions. It's possible that a particularly unhygienic car dealer, for instance, could make a difference to the price for which you agree to sell your vehicle. Jennifer Lerner and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University showed that a feeling of disgust can cause people to sell their property at knock-down prices. After watching a scene from the film Trainspotting, in which a character reaches into the bowl of an indescribably filthy toilet, they sold a pack of pens for an average of &dollar;2.74, compared with a price of &dollar;4.58 for participants shown a neutral clip of coral reefs. Curiously, the disgusted participants denied being influenced by the Trainspotting clip, and instead justified their actions with more rational reasons.

Lerner, now at Harvard, calls it the "disgust-disposal" effect, in which the yuck factor causes you to expel objects in close proximity, regardless of whether they are the cause of your disgust. She also found that people were less likely to buy something when feeling disgust. Perhaps this is why, aside from public health campaigns, there is little evidence of product advertisers using disgust as part of their marketing strategies.

So, armed with all this knowledge about the psychology of disgust, is it possible to spot and overcome the subtle triggers that influence behaviour? And would we want to?

Some would argue that instead of trying to overcome our sense of disgust, we should listen to our gut feelings and be guided by them. The physician Leon Kass, who was chairman of George W. Bush's bioethics council from 2001 to 2005, has made the case for the "wisdom of repugnance". "Repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power to fully articulate it," he wrote in his 2002 book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity.

Still, is it really desirable for, say, bad smells to encourage xenophobia or homophobia? "I think it's very possible to override disgust. That's my hope, in fact," says Pizarro. "Even though we might have very strong disgust reactions, we should be tasked with coming up with reasons independent of this reflexive gut reaction."

For those seeking to avoid disgust's influence, it's first worth noting that some people are more likely to be grossed out than others, and that the triggers vary according to culture (see "Cheese and culture"). In general, women tend to be more easily disgusted than men, and are far more likely to be disgusted about sex. Women are also particularly sensitive to disgust in the early stages of pregnancy or just after ovulation - both times when their immune system is dampened.

The young are more likely to be influenced by the yuck factor, and we tend to become less easily disgusted as we grow old. This could boil down to the fact that our senses become less acute with age, or perhaps it is simply that older people have had more life experience and take a more rational view of potential threats.

If they so choose, it is possible for anybody to become desensitised to disgusting things by continued exposure over time. For example, while faeces is the most potent disgust trigger, it's amazing how easy it is to overcome it when you have to deal with your own offspring's bowel movements. And psychologists have shown that after spending months dissecting bodies, medical students become less sensitive to disgust relating to death and bodily deformity.

Pizarro suspects that there may also be shortcuts to overriding disgust - even if the tips he has found so far may not be especially practical for day-to-day life. One of his most recent experiments shows that if you can prevent people from making that snarled-lip expression when they experience disgust - by simply asking them to hold a pencil between their lips - you can reduce their feeling of disgust when they are made to view revolting images. This, in turn, makes their judgement of moral transgressions less severe.

Happily, our lives are already a triumph over disgust. If we let it rule us completely, we'd never leave the house in the morning. As Paul Rozin, often called the "father of the psychology of disgust", has pointed out, we live in a world where the air we breathe comes from the lungs of other people, and contains molecules of animal and human faeces.

It would be wise not to think about that too much. It really is quite disgusting.

Cheese and culture

On a recent summer's day, a stench filled New Scientist 's London office. It smelled like sweaty feet bathed in vomit, or something long past its sell-by date. Soon its source became clear&colon; someone had returned from Paris with a selection of France's finest soft cheeses. How can something that smells revolting be so delicious?

For a start, no matter how potent, smells can be ambiguous. We need more information to tell us whether something really is revolting or not.

"With smell, the meaning is based on context much more so than with vision," says smell researcher Rachel Herz, author of the book That's Disgusting. In other words, a vomit smell in an alley beside a bar will immediately conjure up a mental picture of a disgusting source, but exactly the same aroma would evoke deliciousness in a fine restaurant, she says.

The stinky cheese also illustrates the power of culture over our minds. Westerners have learned that cheese is a good thing to eat - a badge of cultural distinction, even. This explains why rotten shark meat is a delicacy in Iceland, says Herz, and the liquor chicha, made from chewed and spat-out maize, is a popular drink in parts of South America. Food choices mark out who is part of our group - hence the strong religious taboos about pork which have endured long past the time when consuming it carried a serious risk of food poisoning.

The influence of culture on disgust isn't limited to food. Kissing is public is seen as distasteful in India, whereas Brits are more revulsed by mistreatment of animals. Christian participants in one study even experienced a sense of disgust when reading a passage from Richard Dawkins's atheist manifesto The God Delusion. As Herz says&colon; "To a large extent, what is disgusting or not is in the mind of the beholder."

Many things probably transcend cultural influence, however. Using a selection of disgusting images, Valerie Curtis at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered a universal disgust towards faeces, with vomit, pus, spit and a variety of insects following close behind in the revulsion stakes. Delicious, these are not.

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The yuck factor: The surprising power of disgust

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From politics to commerce to sex, the "forgotten emotion" of disgust can affect you in subtle ways Take the test: " How easily disgusted are you? " DAVID PIZARRO can change the way you think, and all he needs is a small vial of liquid. You simply have to smell it.