Some get tired of the same story / and quit speaking; / […] / What will we learn today? / There should be an answer, / and it should / change.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye123 While theology students like Segura, Chalmers, Brumfield, Ilbodou, and Ibarra may experience writing as a loss of voice, there is the possibility that they can also experience academic writing as an opportunity to create their own voices. Rather than relying solely on techniques of repetition and demonstration in their theological writing, they might be guided to become aware of the various voices they encounter and then to construct their own heteroglossic voices in response to the ongoing theological discourse.
Some who do not feel they have anything meaningful to add to the chorus of voices in conversation may “get tired of the same story / and quit speaking,” as the poet Nye worries. Theological educators can assist them in moving through the sense of loss and frustration that attends any struggle by helping them gain rhetorical/analytical tools for writing new stories and developing new answers for the time and places that we live in.
Students will then be better equipped by understanding the layers of rhetorical complexity that attend writing for the three theological publics of the church, the academy, and wider society. We can help them move from the despairing statement, “I have lost my voice,” to the creative response of, “I have made a new voice.”
123 Naomi Shihab Nye, “Telling the Story,” 132-133. See the full poem in Appendix F.
It is crucial for theological educators to embrace the discursive tensions in our communications and to work with our students so that they will be prepared to go as ministers into the pluralistic world in which we live. Our students are going out to be priests and activists, educators and spiritual directors, pastoral caregivers and preachers in a world that is changing so fast that we can scarcely grasp what is happening; they are facing doing their work in a context like no other and need the all the tools we can offer to find their way toward doing good work in relation to other people. We must encourage our theology students to engage in the “generative struggle”124 in and through writing as they negotiate the conflicts between externally authoritative discourses and their
internally persuasive discourses in order to turn their ideas and their talents out beyond the academy and into the world and the church. This is a process of helping them construct voices that engage in some meaningful way with the externally authoritative discourses even as they seek to articulate their internally persuasive discourses to others.
As we do so, theological educators must ponder the overlapping conceptions of voice that Bakhtin and rhetorical thinkers offer us. First, we must teach students from an understanding of voice as a process of negotiating social relationships that reflect
negotiations of power; this includes a conscious layering of the various rhetorical dimensions of writing (writer, audiences, subject matter, text, and voice) in a particular context. Second, we must understand and practice voice as a way of understanding the relationality of writing, which allows us to respond to previous members of these discourses and to anticipate future conversation partners who might be responsive to us.
Third, we must understand the conscious construction of voice(s) as a way for students to be responsive to the demands of each particular academic writing project assigned to
124 Farmer, “Voice Reprised,” 316.
them. Fourth, we must accept that voice itself is borne of generative struggle, an ongoing process resulting, in all likelihood, in multiple voices.
An awareness of voice(s) in our own and others’ writing allows us to
acknowledge the something that is “held between us” in written discourse so that we and our students might understand our writing to be a deeply social activity rich in the potential to connect us to (or disconnect us from) others, to ourselves, to the world, to ideas, and to God. As theological educators, we must teach students to construct their own voices, not ours or someone else’s. They must do this new thing instead of simply internalizing the authoritative theological discourse to become masterful copyists. To do otherwise is to assist our students, our future ministers and theologians, and theology itself in becoming less and less relevant. To do otherwise would be to choke students’
own voices in their throats, stifling creativity not only of each one of them as a writer, but also of the ongoing theological discourse itself. What is at stake is the future of our students’ vocational work, the health of the communities that they serve in various capacities, and the viability of theological discourse itself.
The next chapters take up the challenge of thinking more deeply about the negotiations of power that accompany the construction of voice in this struggle between the centripetal and centrifugal in theological writing, for this is not a struggle without real risk for the writer. In particular, Chapter Three examines voice from the vantage point of Black feminist/womanist intersectional theory, which employs a range of intellectual resources to analyze power and authority. In this case, the focus is specifically upon student voices as they emerge within theological education in North America. The student of theology finds herself in a very complex and often very difficult position as a
writer, given the power dynamics within the academy and the role of the authoritative word in academic theological writing. This fraught context makes the creation and orchestration of voices by students quite challenging. Intersectional theory is helpful in unpacking the relevant features of academic life for those of us who wish to assist students in developing their voices and in determining how best to employ those voices once they have graduated and gone into their various careers and vocations. This next step in the larger argument will, hopefully, help us toward encouraging students to tell a new story, to create a new voice, to participate in enlivening theological discourse, and to enrich the lives of those it is intended to benefit. It will also push us, as theological educators, toward changing the story of writing within theological education for the benefit of our students, the church, wider society, and the academy itself.
Chapter Three
Examining the Hidden Complexities of Voice: An Intersectional Analysis of Power in Writing Practical Theology for the Church, Academy, and Society
We needed to bring our voices to the table and to make sure that our voices are heard.
~ Jacquelyn Grant125