Theory That Can Be Lived: In Conversation about (with) Lived Experience

Heather Walton’s recent Practical Theology Beyond the Empirical Turn presses practical theology to rethink what counts as theory.[1] Rather than treating theory as an abstract system or a critical tool applied from outside, she invites us to see it as something that condenses and circulates through shared stories, images, practices, and felt worlds. She argues that practical theology has overlooked the way that theory functions as “collective sentiment” and “shared narrative”.[2]

Taking that provocation seriously, we place our research projects into conversation. One of us (Chris) works on liturgy and symbolic action. The other (Giorgio) studies LGBTQ+ Catholic identity. In both contexts, lived experience is treated not as illustrative material but as a generative site where theological meaning is formed, deformed, strained, and sometimes remade.

We write, then, in response to Walton’s call for forms of knowing that exceed narrow empiricism and attend to the poetics, the diverse textures, and the collective sentiments and narratives through which faith is actually lived. Our conversation explores how lived experience functions – methodologically, ethically, and theologically – in qualitative research, and how reflexivity, the crisis of representation, and fieldwork are reshaped when theory is understood as an emerging shared symbolic system rather than a pre-given framework.

Lived experience as an interpretive and embodied event

Chris: I understand lived experience as the interpretive event in which meaning is continually found, generated, contested, and reconfigured within the concrete lives of diverse human persons. It is not reducible to subjective feeling, nor even to a record of events, but names the space where being and becoming are negotiated in relation to others, to the world, to tradition, and to God. Lived experience is therefore always embodied, affective, relational, and embedded, historically and practically situated, and it unfolds through language, practice, habit, and imagination.

This understanding takes seriously the hermeneutical insistence that meaning is not a static object to be retrieved but something that happens. This hermeneutical situation (a spiral) is not a regrettable distortion but the condition of possibility for understanding. Lived experience is precisely such a situation: a space of distance, difference, and encounter in which understanding becomes possible because it is not guaranteed in advance.

As a theologian, I read this pneumatologically: lived experience is the theatre of the Spirit’s work in the world today. It is the place where God’s creative activity continues to unfold, not behind experience, nor above it, but within its ordinary textures. To speak of lived experience is to locate theology not first in abstract norms or formal systems, but in the pulse of life as it is lived and interpreted.

Giorgio: I like to think of lived experience as that special place which focuses on how people journey through life and their act (our act) of navigating its complexity in their (our) daily practices and actions. If we specifically look at the field of religious studies, which is the one my research focuses on, then the importance of lived experience becomes even more evident.

To give an example, I specifically study the intersection of LGBTQ+ and Catholic identity, and Catholic doctrine is very clear in its staunch disapproval of same-sex relations. Yet there are still many LGBTQ+ Catholics who, while knowing the Catechism very well (often better than those who persecute them, as it very often happens with people belonging to minority groups who have to constantly defend their basic humanity and, in order to do so, develop a refined knowledge of the “weapons” their oppressors may turn to) actively decide which parts they want to follow and which parts they decide to leave aside because their conscience illuminates a more truthful path.

These acts of negotiating doctrine in one’s life also belong to the category of lived experience and are fierce acts of reclamation that also challenge the way we think about religion. Focusing on lived experience in the field of religion (also referred to as “lived religion”) is enriching for the way it expands the horizons of the category we use when describing religion itself by focusing on everyday faith practices. It challenges the dichotomy of sacred versus profane and proposes the idea that religion is not only performed in certain “sacred” spaces or while doing certain actions.

During the semi-structured interviews I am doing for my project, for example, I have talked to LGBTQ+ people in same-sex relationships that have not attended church for a long time, as they feel that they are not welcome, yet their religiosity is as alive as ever, and accompanies them during the day, while they pray on their way to work or when they mediate on God’s love for creation in the secret of their bedroom or while walking in a park. Paying attention to these everyday dimensions of faith is crucial to my PhD project, as it reveals how LGBTQ+ Catholics sustain religious meaning and identity even in contexts where institutional recognition is absent.

Together: Walton’s account of theory as collective sentiment helps us see that these are not simply private negotiations. They are sites where shared symbolic worlds are being reworked. Lived experience is where doctrine, ritual, memory, and desire meet the grain of ordinary life, and where new metaphors, refusals, and hopes begin to form and circulate.

Why lived experience matters in qualitative research

Chris: Lived experience is essential to qualitative research because such research is concerned not merely with describing beliefs or practices, but with understanding how meaning is made and sustained within real lives. Without sustained attention to lived experience, research risks producing accounts that are formally coherent but existentially thin  – what Clifford Geertz might recognise as “thin” description without the depth of lived meaning that “thick” description seeks to capture – accounts that speak about people without allowing those people to speak from within their own worlds.[3] Experience, like text, proposes a world. Qualitative research attends to how that world is formed, inhabited, resisted, or transformed.

Theologically speaking, the stakes are even higher. If the Incarnation and Pentecost bind divinity irrevocably to human life, then to dismiss experience as merely subjective is not mere methodological caution but a deeply theological failure. Attending to lived experience is both an epistemological and an ethical act. It requires listening seriously to voices that theology has often marginalised, and remaining open to the possibility that God may be encountered precisely there.

Giorgio: Recognising my positionality as a queer Catholic researcher, who is therefore informed by debates happening in the Catholic world, there is a sentence by Pope Francis that has resonated deeply with me: “Realities are greater than ideas”.[4]

How, then, can these realities be truly captured if not through qualitative research? No number of philosophical or theological insights that are detached from the lives of people can offer genuine insight into lived realities unless approached through qualitative methods.

I believe that, especially as a researcher studying the Catholic tradition, I have a duty to remain grounded in these realities and to draw on them to reflect how they challenge doctrine and open up new imaginative pathways for what the Church can become, and not just to describe what it currently is. In this regard, both interviews and ethnography allow researchers to be questioned and (un)learn by listening to others.

It is precisely qualitative research that enables us to move beyond doctrine and to access the complexity of lived realities: how people navigate tensions between their faith, identity, and daily practice in their lives.

When lived experience unsettles theologies

Chris: In analysing survey responses on symbolic action within the liturgy as part of my doctoral research, I encountered an unexpected asymmetry. Participants spoke readily of God as Creator and invoked the Spirit with warmth and immediacy, yet Christ was almost entirely absent from their accounts.

A normative doctrinal reading might have treated this as catechetical imprecision  – as a gap in Christian teaching, knowledge, or formation. But attending carefully to lived experience, how participants actually inhabited and interpreted the liturgy, opened a different horizon. The absence of Christ suggested not ignorance but assumption: Christ’s presence appeared to be so taken for granted that it no longer needed to be named.

This raised a more unsettling theological question. Might we be witnessing a liturgical economy in which Christ is presumed rather than enacted? Might the liturgy be failing to perform its incarnational task? This insight emerged only by treating lived experience as an interpretive site rather than as deficient data, by allowing the responses to propose a world that called existing assumptions into question.

Giorgio: I attended the LGBTQ+ pilgrimage that took place in Rome in the context of the Jubilee on 6 September 2025. I went there as part of my fieldwork, but I would have gone as a participant had I not been conducting my research. I think that there were tensions between how the media reported on the event, how it was expected to be, and how it actually was. Being there on that day allowed me to see the pilgrimage for myself, as well as to experience, as a queer person of faith, the wave of emotions that flowed through all of us present, something that I would not have been able to capture through interviews alone.

In the complexity of how the event was reported on in the months leading up to it, doing fieldwork allowed me to bask in a happiness that surpasses categories and boxes, that sheer feeling of joy of being able to enter the doors of St Peter’s together with many people who were hand in hand with the person whom they love, something I saw several same-sex couples do.

Together: In both cases, lived experience does not simply confirm or illustrate theology. It presses back. It exposes assumptions, silences, and excesses of joy that theory, in Walton’s sense, must learn to receive as part of its own formation.

Reflexivity beyond self-protection

Chris: Authentic representation begins with reflexivity. I maintain a detailed reflexive journal throughout the research process, tracing how my own assumptions, emotions, and theological commitments shape interpretation. This practice acknowledges that the interpreter’s horizon is decisive, not as a position to be enforced, but as an opinion and a possibility that one brings into play and puts at risk.

I also employ member checking, inviting participants to engage with draft interpretations of their contributions. This honours participants as co-interpreters rather than subjects of analysis and strengthens both ethical accountability and interpretive accuracy. I preserve participants’ own language wherever possible through in vivo transcription and coding. Tone, metaphor, and narrative rhythm are not incidental but carry theological weight.

Together, in response to Walton and her interpreters: At the same time, Walton’s work, and other critiques of the reflexive method, caution us against allowing reflexivity to harden into ritual self-disclosure. It can become a gesture of self-absolution, a brief nod to positionality before the researcher moves briskly on to the supposedly real work. In that defensive mode, reflexivity reassures readers that we know we are situated while leaving deeper questions of power, representation, and consequence largely untouched.

We recognise that temptation. Practical theologians working qualitatively can find themselves on the back foot, anxious to prove legitimacy to external academic audiences or to apologise in advance for the traditions that have formed us. We can end up building methodological huts we do not intend to inhabit, postures that signal credibility but do not truly reshape how we listen, interpret, or write.

Walton’s provocation pushes reflexivity further. The task is not to clear ourselves, but to remain relationally accountable. Reflexivity becomes an ongoing willingness to be unsettled, to acknowledge implication, and to take responsibility for how our research helps shape the worlds we study. It is less a shield and more a practice of staying answerable to those whose lives we interpret.

Giorgio: Interviewing people is a very delicate process for a variety of reasons, first and foremost, their privacy, but also ensuring that the stories that are being shared with you are treated with care and accurately represented. That would mean being careful with regard to extrapolation, to not just treat the interviews as moments where one goes digging for data that can be extracted and used to suit one’s argument, but as precious occasions of vulnerability and trust. It is fundamental to recognise this and see participants as active co-creators of research rather than only as sources of information.

For this reason, I follow Audra Simpson’s concept of ethnographic refusal: “a calculus ethnography of what you need to know and what I refuse to write in”.[5] This implies actively choosing what to leave out of the narrative, even when it seems to be relevant for the research, in order to honour participants’ vulnerabilities and moments of intimacy and uncertainty.

Methods that stay close to life

Chris: My own research employs hermeneutic phenomenology, which I find particularly generative for theological inquiry. This approach acknowledges that experience is always mediated by language, culture, history, and power, and refuses the illusion of neutral description. It does not seek to distil an essence of experience, but attends to how meaning unfolds in interpretation and how interpretation, in turn, reshapes the self.

Giorgio: I think that there is great power in the methodological tool of fieldwork. As I mentioned earlier, doing fieldwork in Rome in the context of the Jubilee is what allowed me to really live the experience and see things for myself. This experience was then also reported back to me in interviews I did later with people who also attended the pilgrimage. But it is in these moments that I can see most clearly how fieldwork and interviews can complement one another so beautifully.

I will give a specific example. The morning of the Mass on 6 September, there was the possibility to confess before Mass. There were a lot of priests who were facilitating the Sacrament, but one thing that I remember very clearly is the long queues, which also ties into the fact that many LGBTQ+ people very often feel barred from this Sacrament and feel they cannot partake in it. I also decided to go confess, something I had not done in years, and stand in those queues myself. This is one of those moments where research gets blended with one’s own experience as a participant, and as a matter of fact, I do intend to write an auto-ethnographic piece on this at one point. I cherished my talk with the priest, which also made me feel seen and valued.

Towards a theory that can be lived

Our conversation suggests three methodological implications. First, lived experience is not simply material for theological reflection but a site of theory formation. Second, reflexivity must be relational rather than procedural. Third, qualitative methods allow theology to remain accountable to the lives it interprets.

Walton’s insistence that theory functions as collective sentiment and shared narrative is not a call to aestheticise qualitative research. It is a methodological and theological reorientation. If theory is a shared symbolic system, then lived experience is one of the places where that system is generated, contested, and reconfigured.

In Giorgio’s research context, lived experience names the negotiation of doctrine and identity through conscience, love, refusal, and daily practices. It also reveals how violence can be produced through institutional language when doctrine speaks as if from nowhere, detached from faces, conditions, and bodies.

In Chris’s work, lived experience exposes tacit liturgical assumptions and silences that challenge theological imaginaries from within practice itself. It reveals that even what is not said may be a form of theological meaning, and that listening well requires interpretive patience and methodological humility.

Together, we have tried to show that qualitative practical theology cannot be content with treating lived experience as data and theory as a framework. Walton’s third sense of theory presses us to see how theory is forming as shared narrative, metaphor, ritual, and symbol, an ecology that shapes what can be believed, said, endured, or hoped. If lived experience is where theory emerges as collective sentiment, then attending to it is not optional. It is the test of whether theology can be lived at all.

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Notes and References

[1] Heather Walton, Practical Theology Beyond the Empirical Turn (SCM Press, 2025).

[2] Ibid, 14.

[3] Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.

[4] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 233.

[5] Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, no. 9 (2007): 72.

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© Christopher West and Giorgio Maria Millesimi, 2026. This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “St Mary’s Prayer Candles” by AFrostWithACamera is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.