The power of biases is hard to minimize in Theology because everyone has a bias somewhere on the religious spectrum. Often the religious affiliation of the researcher comes into question. Why would you let someone who doesn’t share your belief, tell you how your belief works? This is the mess of Theology. Jews write about Muslims, who write about Atheists, who write about Christians, who write about Agnostics, who write about Buddhists. So there’s always a pinch of salt when reading research from the ‘other.’ Even when someone writes about their own belief, (A Christain writing about the Bible) they are critiqued for being biased toward their own religion.
Basically, it’s a huge mess and a mess that I will enter soon. I am incredibly interested in Islam yet have no background or heritage within the Islamic world. So how do I research Islam without it sounding like I’m filming a nature documentary? This was the general message I got from the panel; your research shouldn’t sound like a nature documentary, where you are explaining the actions of animals that don’t have a voice. The people you are researching have a voice and that voice should be heard in more than just a bar graph.
Including the people of your research, all throughout your research is what I really took away from the panel. I can never speak for how life is as a Muslim, and I don’t have to, because Muslims speak for themselves. I’m researching not filming bloody Planet Earth.
It might helpful to distinguish researching from communicating. Attenborough is a world-renowned educator because he presents things in a simple way — simple enough for the layperson to understand. Complicated ideas are hard to get across, which is why researchers spend so long trying to understand the world.
If after investigating a topic, your understanding were at the level of a Life documentary, it’d be a cause for concern. But if after you emerge from the library, you are able to distil your learning into something anyone can understand, that’s an achievement of comprehension, and a cause for celebration.
What I’m getting at is that learning and teaching are very different tasks, with their own difficulties. Best of luck with both.
P.S. In your About section you write “I am a classist and theologian”. It seems like you mean ‘classicist’ rather than a person who discriminates based on social class.
Hi Gali, thanks for the comment. I was using the example of Attenborough not to describe the quality of research, whether simplified or not, but the way in which Attenborough has to speak for the animals (because animals can’t speak). I agree the ability to distil knowledge is amazing and Attenborough does it marvellously. However, my point was that research isn’t a nature documentary studying voiceless animals, research often involves people and people have voices that should be heard throughout one’s research. Hopefully, that clarifies my blog, if not, feel free to reply to this comment.
Also thank you for pointing out that typo, two letters really makes all the difference