Abstract
This essay explores the academic writing life through narrative and practical strategy. It attempts to get at larger questions of method in pastoral theology through the concrete subject matter of how I (and others) go about writing, illustrating in both content and procedure key methodological assumptions that guide work in pastoral theology, such as reflexivity, concern for the daily, demand to perform well the practice we study, and commitment to deeper transformation. I argue, among other things, that writers (in pastoral theology and beyond) manage the challenge and lure of writing through intentional crafting of everyday patterns in time and space. Ultimately, the material disciplines of writing open up into important vocational and spiritual questions and habits.
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Notes
I end up saying quite a bit in a book written for a wider lay public, In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice (2006).
See Sara Estes, “Charles Brindley, Cheekwood celebrate trees through art,” The Tennessean, January 31, 2015, http://www.tennessean.com/story/life/arts/2015/01/31/charles-brindley-cheekwood-celebrate-trees-art/22424825/, accessed 22 Sept 2015; See also http://www.cbrindley.com/, accessed 22 Sept 2015.
Due dates remind us of our finitude, as graduate professor Langdon Gilkey liked to say in class, illustrating what neoorthodox theologian Paul Tillich (1951, p. 193) meant when he talked about basic existential parameters of our being in time.
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Miller-McLemore, B.J. Getting it Write: On the Craft of Academic Writing. Pastoral Psychol 65, 803–820 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0707-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0707-3