Acknowledgements
Thanks to a pandemic and my second life as an academic administrator, this book took eight years to complete. Along the way so many conversation partners, supportive friends, and colleagues supported me through the process. The older I get, the more I realize how good colleagues and conversation partners are critical to whatever wisdom I might manage to get on paper.
The Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, supported me throughout the writing of this text, including allowing a year-long sabbatical in 2021–2022 that was essential to completing the first full draft of the manuscript. My Iliff faculty colleagues have been friends as well as professional colleagues. After nearly two decades of working with some of them, they have shaped my thinking and scholarship in currents now below conscious thought. Boyung Lee and Cathie Kelsey were wise and supportive deans who made my work and scholarship possible. Miguel De La Torre and Tink Tinker challenged the Iliff faculty over a decade ago to write about how whiteness defined their academic fields. It took a while, but here it is. Jennifer Leath became an important writing partner and sounding board over the course of this project, even after she moved to her new position in Canada. Our books were written together over Zoom, in outdoor walks when we were in the same city, and through the pandemic and so many life changes. Albert Hernandez and Eric Smith were also writing collaborators in the early stages of this project. Several colleagues at Iliff: Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi, Carrie Doehring, Amy Erickson, and Jeffrey Mahan read pieces of this book in early forms and offered critical feedback.
The doctoral students in practical theology I have had the privilege to work with over the years have shaped my thinking about the field and deepened my acumen within it, particularly Julie Todd, Hannah Ingram, Emily Kahm, Paula Lee, Zachary Moon, Tracy Temple, Rode Molla, Wesley Snedecker, Eunjin Jeon, Smash Caine-Conley, Tory Moir, Mana Tun, and Anthony Houston. Doctoral students who I worked with who wouldn’t identify as practical theologians but have shaped my thinking nonetheless with their wisdom and partnership include Jenny Whitcher, Teresa Crist, Cari Myers, Becky David Hensley, David Scott, Heike Peckruhn, Ben Sanders, Jared Vazquez, and Mark Freeland. The opportunity to teach DMin students about practical theological research has also invited me into their practices of ministry and the challenges and creativity they experience as they live and work in the realities I tried to describe here. Your questions, conversations, and constructions made me a better scholar and teacher, and I am so grateful to have crossed paths with each one of you. The master’s students at Iliff who took introductory practical theology classes with me, always starting with confusion about the oxymoronic name of the course and ending with their own important constructive projects, opened my perspective beyond the Christian tradition and congregational setting of these kinds of reflections. You invited me into your past experiences, theological reflections, and unique contexts with patience, passion, and resistance in ways that have clarified my own perspectives.
The indomitable Debbie Creamer read an early draft of this project and encouraged me not to scrap it in a period of doubt and uncertainty. The queer intergenerational scholarly family we have built has been such a source of strength and an example of why interdependence and intentional relationality are critical to survival and flourishing in academic work. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Kathleen Cahalan, Joyce Mercer, Laura Kelly Fanucci, and Jane Patterson were also writing companions, particularly at the Episcopal House of Prayer in Collegeville, MN, where we spend several days writing together while they introduced me to the joys of pour-over coffee and gin gimlets.
Much of this manuscript was also written in the summers at Ring Lake Ranch in the Torrey Creek Valley of the Wind River Mountains just outside of Dubois, Wyoming. That community of staff, speakers, and guests and the land itself has been an extended family to my own for over a dozen years now. They have been conversation partners, comic relief, meal companions, and so much more, often as they were on vacation, and I was hiding out in the cabin to write. There are too many conversation partners who have passed through that thin place who served as gifts to my thinking to name them all, but I am particularly grateful to Amy Mears, Julie Mavity-Maddalena, Mo Morrow, Leah Vader, Alli Moore, and Kat Harrell for our extended time together in that space.
The Wabash Center has been another place where I connected with many early career scholars and collaborative leadership partners over the years of writing this. Thanks to Lucinda Huffaker, Dena Pence, Lynne Westfield, Paul Myhre, Willie Jennings, Eric Barreto, Roger Nam, Ralph Watkins, Elizabeth Drescher, Mary Hess, Mary Stimming, Joe Favazza, Patricia Killen, Ted Hiebert, Carolyn Medine, Mai-Anh Le Tran, and so many other faculty colleagues and doctoral students who shared their teaching lives and scholarly wisdom over many years of working together. Your commitments to excellence in scholarship and teaching continues to inspire my own.
Two scholarly guilds have also introduced me to many of the people who are my conversation partners here in footnotes but who also have been friends and co-conspirators in real life. The Religious Education Association and the Association of Practical Theology introduced me to so many people over the years who have influenced this book, and my years of reading conference proposals, reviewing journal articles, and serving on boards and committees for both organizations have deepened and broadened my understanding of these disciplines.
I appreciate the support of Elaine Graham and Bonnie Miller-McLemore as editors of this series, and two very fine reviewers who gave this manuscript such a constructive and thoughtful read. I have been blessed with so many good colleagues in fields that value constructive collaboration that my writing should be brilliant. All mistakes and shortcomings here are my own. I wish I could have risen to the caliber of book that you envisioned for me, but I can only offer this one humbly instead.
Krista Turpin and Jessa Decker-Smith were sister-companions along the way who made sure I had a life and conversation partners outside of the worlds of theological education. I have danced between the vocation of mother and scholar for decades now, and I don’t know that I have become proficient at doing both at the same time, but I am grateful to have also gotten to companion all my children as they grew into their young adult selves in the time it took to finish this book. We had some tender and precious extra time with them in this season due to the shared quarantining of the pandemic years, and we are readjusting now as they move out of our orbit and into the unique rhythms of their own lives. Elizabeth, Christian, and Benjamin, being your mother has been an experience beyond my wildest dreams, and I am so proud of the beautiful humans you are becoming. You have all been good sports when I wanted to draw on my experience of parenting in my scholarship, and this time it was Ben’s turn. Finally and most importantly, Andy, you show up every day and make our lives possible, attending to the details that allow us to stay afloat and navigate the currents of life even in the roughest waters. You make me laugh, you hold me when I cry, and you are still the first person with whom I want to share the good, the bad, and the ugly.