R.Ruard Ganzevoort, Teaching that Matters: A Course on Trauma and theology

Looking back on my work in practical theology so far, I have always searched for teaching and research that matters to real people. My student years were not always too fulfilling in that respect. I learned a lot of course, and some of the material we studied was intellectually rather challenging, but I found it difficult to understand the connection between the conceptual systems and ritual traditions that we studied and the real life questions I encountered on the outside. Theological disputes often seemed mere mind games, fascinating but unreal. Even when I read a practical theological study that explicitly linked the intra-trinitarian communication to the communal structure of the congregation, thereby grounding practical ecclesiology in the core notions of theology, I felt completely in the blind as to what this meant. The author clearly intended more than using trinity as a model, but I could not understand what this „more‟ would be, let alone explain to non-theological peers what on earth we were doing. Now maybe I wasn‟t the best of students, but I was left with an unfulfilled desire for a theology that mattered, for a theology that communicated beyond the theological department and beyond the church. That is why I chose to specialize in pastoral psychology and missiology. Since then I have become heavily involved in the discipline of psychology of religion, where at least I understood why something would count as knowledge or truth. But more and more, I also felt the need to reconnect theology and praxis.