Field Notes from a Discipline in Decline

And imagining what comes after

AS SOME OF YOU already know, the last book I wrote was about death. It’s not easy to shake the death studies lens, especially not during times of massive upheaval and change, when every transformation can feel like a little death of sorts. So it may be no surprise when I tell you that I’ve also been thinking about my own field—academic theology—through that same lens. Even before AI started to blow up academia, and the Trump administration started gutting it, I’d been hearing my colleagues in the field lament that they were doing hospice care for an academic discipline.

This, at least in part, is something that I take on in my forthcoming second book project, which is currently under review. I hope to be able to tell you more about that project, soon (I will say that the working title is More Than Human Power: On the Afterlives of Theology.) But, as part of the research for that book, and also just to check my own intuitions about these matters, I decided to interview a host of colleagues in the field. I had some really excellent conversations with them last spring (which feels like a lifetime ago!) What emerged was a strong blend of worry, insight, and some wise observations about what’s worth holding onto, but also what it feels good (and right) to let go of.

The Other Journal has just published the essay I wrote, about these interviews, as part of an issue they’ve published on death. I realize that might sound bleak, but I don’t think the essay is bleak at all. There’s some grief, about what’s being lost. But there’s also a lot of gratitude about what it feels like to be part of the strange collective enterprise that is an academic field.

The essay collects, and remixes, those conversations. It offers an occasion to mourn what might be fading, and to imagine what might come next. One of the things that I realized, after having these conversations, is how much I’ve appreciated (and often taken for granted) the way that academic theology exists today as a kind of inherently liminal space in academia. As Sameer Yadav put it, theology is a kind of “nowhere zone” that sits outside of the spaces of normative accountability that shape so many other academic fields. Theology might be strange and esoteric (and even irrelevant), but that’s part of makes it possible to do absolutely weird and otherwise uncategorizable stuff, and get away with it. I love it for that reason.

I think that the odd liminal nature of theology is also part of what renders it especially open to having conversations like this one: conversations that reflect pretty openly on the mortality of our shared enterprises, and that don’t shy away either from the difficult or the uplifting tensions.

But the conversations we’re having here—about the long and near term futures of academic disciplines—aren’t just about theology. I know that there are a lot of people who feel, for one reason or another, that their field is also under threat right now, whether because of shrinking resources or just the massive cultural shifts we’re living through. So, I do just want to underscore that I think this essay is for any of us who are navigating uncertainty in our professional and intellectual lives right now.

My hope is that this will become part of a bigger conversation. If you attend the American Academy of Religion conference in November, there’s going to be a roundtable panel with some of the people I interviewed, in the Theology & Religious Reflection unit. But, if you won’t be there, please take a moment to send me a note, post a comment, or share the piece. I’m curious to know what you think, what others think, and what this conversation might look like if it can evolve. I’m always looking for new ways to think, and feel, about these problems and questions.