Take & Read: Practical theology

It is imperative to consider the impact of the past year and a half and its cascading calamities on the Christian church and ministry. Many recent books in the field of practical theology are providing perspectives on how people of faith understand and respond to what has happened and what is next.

Susan J. Dunlap’s Shelter Theology: The Religious Lives of People without Homes (Fortress Press) is an ethnographic study of the religious worlds of people who live without housing. Based on her research and experiences as a shelter chaplain in Durham, North Carolina, Dunlap presents her local context through global conditions such as neoliberal capitalism and White supremacist systems to provide a ratio­nale to address this social wound. She claims that faith communities facing inertia amid social upheaval have much to learn from those that are well practiced in survival among the worst circumstances.

Through the prayer services she offered three days a week at the shelter, Dunlap became aware of an archive of beliefs, sayings, and practices that people without homes have used to find hope and stamina. The prayer services, which provide an alternative space to life on the street, are unscripted. They utilize music, proverbs, testimony, gestures, and forms that predominate in the Black church to create a “zone of belonging and recognition.”