On the plane yesterday I was thinking a lot about the way my dad has learned theology in preparation for the permanent deaconate, and the way I have learned and continue to teach theology. I struggled to articulate for myself the lines of similarity and difference.

At one level, our dramatic roles in the body Catholic are distinct, offering a certain pragmatism of difference. Sometimes we refer to this, clumsily, as “pastoral” theology vs. — well, it would depend on my field for the adjective, but I can say “speculative” provisionally.

There’s also institutional differences. I am not sure how to describe those without upsetting one crowd or another. (The knives come out when we say where/what theology is.) But that I was trained at a university and not a seminary is meaningful, and vice versa.

There’s also a difference of *purpose,* and here’s where I struggled mightily with myself, as I always do in the classroom. My job is to be a very carefully-honed weapon with but one small purpose in a massive, ancient, communal effort. He cannot be that to serve a parish well.

We both serve our bishops. Differently, but that lodestar matters in ways that keep me from feeling absolutely alienated from the work of the parish, though much of my work is not *useful* to the parish unless it undergoes a transformation back into the symbolic and interpersonal

The understanding of faith, Lonergan explains, originates in the interpersonal and symbolic. But theology transforms this understanding from out of this mode and into another, which he calls “systematic.” Very often it is this transition that I aim at relentlessly in class.

Here I get a bit tangled up, because I would *die* on the hill of the transition to the systematic, but it also causes a parting of ways, too, because it’s just one moment in a life of faith, and it is not that faith *while* it serves that faith.

I feel strangely about the parting of ways. I’d fight you with every intellectual knife I had if you tried to collapse theology back down into a pure care for souls and a pure catechesis. But that doesn’t make the withdrawal from dramatic living necessary to my task *easy.*

Anyway none of this satisfied me so I gave up.