Laura Hellsten

Understanding the role of dance in the Western Christian tradition is an underexplored territory. Sources of historical investigations are few and many of them are problematic. In this article commonly used sources are questioned and a re-examination of earlier research is begun. Focusing on the Early Church in dialogue with writing from the patristic period, a new interpretation is done around the theme of dance prohib-ition. The important contributions of Donatella Tronca as well as Graham Pont and Alessandro Alcangeli to the understanding of dance in the Early Church period are expanded by means of a more extensive theological framework. This article also aims at bringing a broader philosophical and societal understanding of the worldview and social imaginary of the Early Church period to bear on earlier research studies.

This article approaches issues arising out of being in the middle of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland in March 2020, both from the point of view of the lived experience of caring for people in our conference setting, and through analysing the statements and actions of the Finnish government from the point of view of an ethics of care. It argues that an ethics of care approach is better equipped at dealing with thinking about and understanding complex life situations such as the spread of the pandemic than what the standardised taxonomy approaches offer. It further states that an ethics of care not only provides concepts and frameworks that help people grapple with challenging situations in an ethical manner, it also enables us to imagine how hospitality and solidarity can be envisioned anew.

This article identifies two different paths where the amnesia described by Hannah- Arendt and the fragmentation identified by Willie James Jennings of our historical past has distorted how people today view dan-cing. I set out how the Christian entanglement with colonial powers has impacted on people’s abilities to relate to their bodies, lands and other creatures of the world. I describe how the colonial wound of Western society forms the basis of the loneliness and alienation that totalitarianism inculcates. After this, I examine how people who seek to find a solid tradition of dance within the Western traditions of Christianity often end up in a conundrum when they seek to legitimize the existence of the tradition in the wrong places. I show how seeking roots for Christian dance practices in Jewish customs is often entangled in supersessionist understandings. These arguments are constructed by means of both J. Kameron- Carter’s writings on race and theology and the black political theology outlined by Vincent W. Lloyd. The second-most-often chosen option for creating a dance tradition for Western forms of Christianity is to romanticize the non-Western ‘other’. Using Lindsey Drury’s work, I argue that dancers have perpetuated the interests that seek to possess the ‘other’ by bringing exotic dancers to the Western marketplace. Finally, I describe the third option – more commonly found amongst those critical of Christian tradition – to seek the roots of transformational dance practices in Hellenistic and more esoteric teachings flourishing in the early twentieth century. We run into the often forgotten or neglected stories of renowned dance teachers like Rudolf Laban and Isadora Duncan on this path. By combining esoteric bodily practices, Mother Earth ‘spirituality’ and superior views about race, they not only promoted but laid the foundation for how people were manipulated in the Third Reich. I end by sharing ethnographic stories of resistance towards how these past historical patterns have affected how dance is viewed today. Those exhibiting such resistance are not always consciously aware of the historical roots I have described. However, engagement in contemplative and healing dance practices seems to be forging new and better ways to create community and to live in a connected way with creation and our creatureliness. The central theme of these practices is to resist the illusion of perfection and control while helping people to listen to and discern the Holy Spirit leading them into a new way of living.

This is a meta-reflection on the methodological and epistemological challenges of doing ethnographic theology in a context outside the church or religious communities. Particularly, it argues that in a multi- or inter-disciplinary setting theologians are placed in a precarious position when it comes to use of language, theories and concepts if they want to speak simultaneously to the people they encounter in the field and to their “own” scientific community. The article asks how a researcher can do theology in a secular environment without doing violence towards ones interlocutors and still be considered to “belong” in the theological community? Based on the lived experiences of ongoing research and particularly concerning the gathering and telling the stories of Women in the Natural sciences, the author weaves together Eileen Campbell-Reed’s and Sarah Coakley’s methodological frameworks in order to present her own method of contemplative dance. The author uses rich metaphors and the sensory experience of “Home” and “Exile” in relationship to the movements in a foot to bring forth her embodied insights about dancing in the messy entanglement of ethnographic research.