After Hegemony: On the Future of Practical Theology in Ireland

Friends now tire of me talking about the future of practical theology in Ireland. I suspect some have begun carefully changing the subject whenever they see me approaching it. Unfortunately for them, and perhaps for you, I remain fascinated by the question.

Part of the problem is that I find practical theology in Ireland frustratingly difficult to locate. Beyond those forms associated with ministerial education (often named ‘pastoral theology,’ and often rather dubious about the designation ‘practical theology’) or those tightly wedded to mission and ministry (where it is frequently renamed ‘applied theology’), it often seems strangely elusive.[1] Yet whenever I raise the matter with colleagues, I encounter an optimism that surprises me.

Perhaps, I am simply looking in the wrong places. If so, I am entirely open to correction­­—indeed, I would welcome it. If there are practical theologians on this island whose work I have missed, please do reach out. It may simply be that, like the speaker in W. B. Yeats’s ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, ‘being young and foolish’, I would not agree.[2] Admittedly, age has done little to cure either condition.

Such optimism is not something we are particularly known for on this island. Samuel Beckett is, perhaps, somewhere in the blood. A line from his Waiting for Godot comes to mind: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’[3] It is hardly a manifesto for hope. Yet neither is it simply despair. It reflects a suspicion of narratives that move too quickly towards resolution or arrival. It is this suspicion that I find myself bringing to thinking about the future of practical theology in Ireland.

This is not a criticism I ever expected to make. For most of its history, practical theology has existed in a context where optimism was not always easy to sustain. It emerged, at least in part, out of dissatisfaction with forms of theology that seemed detached from lived experience.[4] It has repeatedly turned towards experience, practice, embodiment, and context precisely because inherited certainties appeared inadequate to the complexity of actual human lives. One might therefore imagine that practical theology would be naturally resistant to triumphal narratives. Those of us working in trauma theologies, in particular, have learned to be wary of stories that move too quickly from suffering to redemption. Shelly Rambo reminds us that the realities of trauma suggest something far messier than redemptive narratives capture: death and life remain intertwined.[5] Such insights have rightly encouraged practical theologians to become suspicious of narratives that resolve tension too neatly. And yet, I find myself increasingly uneasy with some of the ways we speak about the future, and especially with the assumption that the weakening of one hegemony leaves us somehow after hegemony itself.

Part of this unease arises from the changing landscape of the island I call home. The histories of secularisation and ecclesial power differ significantly across the island’s two jurisdictions, and I do not intend to collapse those differences into a single Irish experience. It is now almost a commonplace observation that the Ireland in which practical theology first emerged no longer exists. The social and cultural dominance of the Catholic Church has been dramatically weakened. This is the decline of a particular ecclesial hegemony, however, not the disappearance of hegemony as a feature of social life. Religious pluralism has become a normal feature of public life. Many of the people with whom practical theologians now work possess little attachment to institutional Christianity. Increasingly, theological reflection takes place in contexts where religious commitment cannot be assumed.

For many practical theologians, these developments represent a welcome opening. I would readily number myself among them. Indeed, part of what attracts me to practical theology is precisely its refusal to assume that theological wisdom emerges only from ecclesial settings. The future of practical theology, it seems to me, belongs to people of many faiths and none, and to the diverse contexts in which questions of meaning, belonging, suffering, and hope continue to be negotiated.

There are, therefore, good reasons to welcome the weakening of ecclesial dominance. It has created space for voices that were previously marginalised or ignored. Questions of gender, sexuality, disability, migration, race, and social exclusion have become increasingly central to theological reflection. The boundaries of the discipline have become more porous. New conversations have become possible. Some of these voices have proven prophetic in the fullest sense of the term. Wren Radford reminds us that the margins are not simply locations of exclusion but sites of critical praxis, places where alternative ways of knowing, resisting, and making meaning are already taking shape.[6] Practical theology has been immeasurably enriched by learning to attend to such voices. I welcome all of this.

What I am less certain about is the assumption that these developments necessarily move us towards a more just future. There has been a tendency, at least within the practical-theological circles with which I am most familiar, to assume that the decline of ecclesial authority creates the conditions for more open, more plural forms of theological reflection. There is certainly some truth in this, but I am not convinced that the weakening of one hegemony should be confused with the arrival of life in abundance.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm retains a similarly prophetic flavour.[7] The problem was never simply who held power but the persistent tendency of power to reproduce itself under new conditions. Some animals, as it turned out, remained more equal than others. The disappearance of one dominant discourse does not guarantee the emergence of a more just one.

Indeed, I increasingly wonder whether practical theology has become too willing to understand itself as a beneficiary of secularisation. The decline of ecclesial authority is often narrated as a release: a movement from constraint to freedom, from exclusion to inclusion. Again, there is truth in such accounts, yet they can also carry a subtle assumption that history itself is moving in the right direction. The collapse of inherited certainties becomes evidence of progress rather than simply a change in conditions. If practical theology once had to struggle against the dominance of ecclesial voices, the story goes, it now finds itself liberated to become what it was always meant to be. I am not sure the story is quite so simple.

After all, power rarely disappears. It relocates. The decline of the Church’s authority has not produced a neutral public sphere, nor has it removed the forces that shape human imagination, determine social priorities, or define whose experiences matter and whose do not. The institutions may be different. The languages may be different. The mechanisms may be different. But the existence of power itself is not in question. Market logics, technocratic expertise, media platforms, state bureaucracies, and the professional academy all exercise their own power to determine which lives become visible and which forms of knowledge are recognised as credible.

Perhaps Beckett understood this better than most. Whatever one makes of the perennial observation that removing the final syllable from ‘Godot’ leaves one with ‘God,’ the truly interesting thing about the play is that power remains present even when the awaited figure does not. While Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, who never arrives, they encounter Pozzo and Lucky, bound together in a brutal relationship of master and servant. When the pair reappear, their circumstances have changed—Pozzo is now blind and Lucky mute—but the relation of power between them persists. Authority does not vanish. It merely changes form.

Nor is it obvious that pluralism should be treated as a synonym for freedom. A society may become more diverse without becoming more just. Pluralism describes the presence of difference; it does not tell us how power is distributed among those who differ. New voices may enter the conversation while others remain unheard. Forms of exclusion may be transformed rather than overcome. The task of practical theology is therefore not merely to welcome more voices into an existing conversation, but to ask who established its terms, who controls its resources, and who retains the power to be heard.

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’ captures the strange mixture of hope and disappointment that accompanies human projects. ‘Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.’[8] It is difficult to imagine a better description of the relationship between aspiration and reality. We continue to hope, even while knowing that things are more fragile than we would like to admit. We pick our blackberries; they do not keep.

This is why I increasingly find myself calling for a refusal of inevitability: a refusal to believe that justice arrives automatically, that pluralism naturally generates inclusion, or that the collapse of one dominant discourse guarantees the emergence of something better. Such a stance may be necessary if practical theology is to take its own commitments seriously.

For if practical theology begins with attention to lived experience, it must remain attentive to the experiences that resist our preferred narratives. Poverty persists amid increasing affluence, just as racism and xenophobia endure amid growing cultural diversity. Women continue to encounter exclusion within institutions that celebrate equality, while disabled people navigate systems ostensibly designed for inclusion and trans bodies remain subject to policing through ritual practice. Meanwhile, quiet forms of loneliness and social fragmentation characterise much of contemporary life. None of these realities disappears simply because Ireland has become notionally less ‘religious.’

One of the ironies of the contemporary moment is that practical theology may have more work to do precisely because ecclesial certainty has diminished. Questions of meaning, belonging, suffering, identity, and hope have not disappeared. If anything, they have become more urgent. What has changed is that no single institution possesses the authority to settle them in advance.

Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly attracted to the idea of a practical theology on this island (and beyond) that is genuinely post-hegemonic. By this, I do not mean anti-Christian, nor even post-Christian. Nor do I mean that hegemony itself has somehow come to an end. I mean a form of theological reflection conducted after the loss of any credible claim that one tradition, institution, or form of knowledge—religious or secular—should govern the conversation in advance.

Such a practical theology would not belong to the Church, nor would it belong to the academy. It would emerge through engagement with the diverse experiences, practices, communities, and struggles that constitute contemporary Ireland. It would remain open to religious and non-religious voices alike. Such openness would not require neutrality towards every claim, particularly where claims deny the dignity or participation of others; the absence of predetermined authority does not absolve practical theologians of the responsibility to make judgments. Most importantly, it would remain suspicious of its own tendency towards self-congratulation. As Courtney Goto has argued, practical theologians are often far more adept at diagnosing the ignorance of others than recognising their own.[9] Every act of knowledge creates its own shadows. Practical theology exercises power whenever it selects participants, interprets testimony, names an experience theological, or decides which forms of knowledge merit publication and institutional recognition. A genuinely post-hegemonic practical theology would remain alert not only to the certainties of Church and society, but also to its own blind spots.

Perhaps the greatest danger facing practical theology is not irrelevance but satisfaction: the belief that the collapse of old certainties, or the decline of ecclesial authority itself, places practical theology on the right side of history. I suspect the opposite may be true. The question, then, is not whether practical theology can escape power, but whether it can learn to recognise, contest, and remain accountable for the power it exercises.

The collapse of one form of hegemony is not the achievement of practical theology’s task, nor does it guarantee the conditions under which that task can be fulfilled. Yet, it may create a space in which theological reflection can proceed without any voice being granted authority in advance. If so, the significance of the contemporary moment lies not in the arrival of freedom but in the opening of a more contested and uncertain conversation. We pick our blackberries knowing they will not keep, and yet we return to the briars each year.

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Notes

[1] This reflects my own working knowledge of several institutions engaged in theological education on the island. The terminology employed varies considerably. For example, Belfast School of Theology locates ministry placements within ‘Applied Theology’; Union Theological College employs both ‘Practical Theology’ and ‘Ministerial Studies’; the Church of Ireland Theological Institute uses ‘Pastoral Studies’; while other institutions, including Trinity College Dublin, St Patrick’s Pontifical University, and Dublin City University, contain programmes and modules that might reasonably be described as practical theology without explicitly adopting that designation. This impression may itself reflect the contested identity of the discipline. Practical theology is variously distinguished from, identified with, or situated alongside pastoral theology, ministerial studies, and applied theology.

[2] W. B. Yeats, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens,’ in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889), line 7.

[3] Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (London: Faber and Faber, 2006; originally published 1952), Act II.

[4] For an overview of the field’s development and contemporary debates, see Katie Cross, ‘Practical and Pastoral Theology,’ in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 4th ed., ed. Rachel Muers and Ashley Cocksworth (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), 381–94.

[5] Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).

[6] Wren Radford, ‘Meaning in the Margins: Postcolonial Feminist Methodologies in Practical Theology,’ Practical Theology 10, no. 2 (2017): 118–32.

[7] George Orwell, Animal Farm (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2025; originally published 1945).

[8] Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry-Picking,’ in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), line 24.

[9] Courtney T. Goto, ‘The Ubiquity of Ignorance: A Practical Theological Challenge of Our Time,’ Practical Theology 13, nos. 1–2 (2020): 138–49.

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

Cover Image: “Blackberry”* by Lastaii is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.