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Teaching Theology and Religion, ISSN 1368-4868, 2004, vol. 7 no. 2, pp 83–94.

Teaching Theological Reflection Well, Reflecting on Writing as a Theological Practice Lucretia B.Yaghjian Episcopal Divinity School and Weston Jesuit School of Theology

Abstract. In order to teach theological reflection well, it is necessary to teach students how to write it well. This paper probes the writing of theological reflection as a rhetorical process and a theological practice by (1) situating theological reflection broadly within a “correlation” model, adapted for theological writers; (2) identifying two “generic” styles of theological reflection papers, the pastoral reflection paper and the systematic reflection paper; (3) following a writer’s progress as she writes a one-page pastoral reflection paper and constructs a working theology in the process of writing it. In conclusion, the correlation-based “Reflecting on Paper” process provides a pedagogical bridge between the writing and teaching of “pastoral” and “systematic” theological reflection, and exemplifies the dynamic interplay between teaching theological reflection and reflecting on writing as a theological practice. “Genuine theology,” write Patricia O’Connell Killen and John deBeer, “is the fruit of a dynamic process of reflection” (Killen and deBeer 1994, 9). However, theological reflection that is written is also the result of a disciplined process of writing, and these integrated processes conspire to render the writing of theological reflection a theological practice (Yaghjian 1997, 39–68). Yet while much has been written about doing theological reflection, (e.g., Whitehead and Whitehead 1980; Hug 1983; Killen and deBeer 1994; Kinast 1996, 2000), little has been written on the process and pedagogy of writing it. As a writing teacher for two theological schools, students frequently ask me, “What is a theological reflection paper, anyway?” In this paper I probe the teaching of written theological reflection as a rhetorical process and a theological practice. First, I shall provide some pedagogical premises and situate theological reflection broadly within a “correlation” model adapted for theological writers, which I call a “Reflecting on Paper” process.

Second, I shall identify two generic styles of theological reflection papers, the pastoral reflection paper and the systematic reflection paper. Third, I shall follow a student writer’s process of writing a pastoral reflection paper and constructing a theology as she writes. Finally, I shall propose a pedagogical bridge to help students move from writing pastoral reflection papers in a personal voice to writing systematic reflection papers in an academic voice, as well as offer some concluding reflections on teaching theological reflection by reflecting on writing as a theological practice.

Teaching Theological Reflection Well: Pedagogical Premises In order to teach theological reflection well, it is necessary to teach students how to write it well. That is the fundamental premise of this essay, and it flows from five constitutive presuppositions.

• First, theology is a spoken and written language that is, in the words of Rowan Williams (1995, 313), “used by a specific group of people to make sense of their world,” and theological reflection is one of its dialects. • Second, theological reflection helps those who engage in it “to make sense of their world” through the disciplined and creative exercise of the theological imagination – by which I mean our active minds thinking, questioning, constructing, critiquing, speaking, and writing in the conceptual language of theology – in dialogue with our individual and communal experience. • Third, in order to write theological reflection well, it is necessary, as Thomas Merton wrote when he was a theological student, “to work out a theology as we go” or, as we write (“It is very difficult to write theology well. . . . I don’t know precisely what I mean