Reengaging Theology in Educational Studies (original) (raw)

This work seeks to do two things. First to make an argument for a robust engagement with theology as a theoretical framework for critical educational research. And second, the piece draws upon contemporary queer and progressive Christian theology, in particular, theological interventions from Marcela Althaus Reid's Indecent Theology to think differently about how educational researchers might frame the way we say yes, as Jen Gilbert suggests, to the students who show up in the classroom. This intervention seeks to center theology as a way to think differently with LGBTQ issues in schooling by arguing with an epistemology that is often used to exclude rather than include marginalized populations. Indecent Theology is a theology which problematizes and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppressions … a theology which, finding its point of departure at the crossroads of Liberation Theology and Queer Thinking, will reflect on economic and theological oppression with passion and imprudence (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 2). Theology in educational research It is vital to note here, that there are, of course, a great many theologies that pervade both historically and of necessity, then, contemporaneously. My use of theology in the singular is to suggest that the field itself, though vastly heterogenous is one perpetually underconsidered in educational scholarship. Though we exist in something of a magpie's nest of pastiched traditions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, law, feminisms, and increasingly, to ill effect often, economics, recent educational scholarship has tended to skirt around work with the theological-with happy exceptions (see: Pinar, 2019; Rocha & Burton 2017; Rocha & Sañudo, forthcoming)-for a number of reasons. This has much to do, one suspects, with the suspicious light in which religion is held, to the degree that it's considered at all in the field of educational research broadly: as a legal matter tied in with discourses around identity positions. There's much to say about the active position religion takes in continually shaping the educational (and research) experience, (see: Author, years) but in this case, while acknowledging the significant shading in the Venn diagram here, the paper works to disentangle, just a bit, the theos from religion. In this case, it's useful to think with Calasso who notes that theos "has