Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship. Anne-Marie Ellithorpe

a practice. For others, only complex social activities, such as playing chess, practicing medicine, or pursuing politics, are practices.

Within the social sciences, practice refers to any socially meaningful action.²⁶ Etienne Wenger, an educational theorist, defines practice as action or doing “that gives structure and meaning to what we do” within specific historical and social contexts.²⁷ This concept of practice includes that which is implicit and unspoken as well as that which is explicit and spoken. Wenger asserts that the process of engaging in practice always involves the whole person. His use of practice integrates practical and theoretical, ideal and reality, talking and doing. From this perspective, each friendship can be viewed as a community of practice. Friendships are typically formed within broader communities of practice, including educational, workplace, religious, and special interest communities. Pursuing friendship, as with other relationships and enterprises, includes an active, embodied, social, negotiated, and at times somewhat delicate process of participation. This use of practice includes the small yet significant actions that contribute towards friendship, such as welcoming, listening, storytelling, and confiding, as well as more complex activities, including discerning, forgiving, and receiving and offering hospitality.

Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre uses the term social practice to refer to “complex social activities that pursue certain goods internal to the practices” themselves.²⁸ By his definition, friendship itself is a social practice, with the goals of authentic friendship being internal to friendship. Yet, as not all actions are considered practices, other activities contributing to friendship are regarded as practices only if there are goals or aims that can be accomplished only by engaging in that form of activity. A person is not regarded as an authentic practitioner if they “instrumentalize” a practice for some other external end.²⁹ To be a practitioner of chess, for example, is to seek those “goods” that are specific to the game, including analytic skill, strategic imagination, and the joy of competition. If one’s key goal in playing chess is to become famous, then one has instrumentalized this practice, as such a goal can be pursued by other means.³⁰

MacIntyre’s influence is reflected in the understanding of Christian practices developed by Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra. These writers define Christian practices as “things Christian people do together over time to address fundamental human needs in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world.”³¹ Their approach presumes that these practices take place within a world sustained by God.³² The emphasis on receptivity and responsiveness to others through practices is in keeping with the nature of friendship. On the other hand, it is recognized that any given practice can be in disrepair and thus become distorted, even destructive.³³ Such deformity can become evident within so-called friendships.

      For the purposes of this research, I draw primarily on Wenger’s use of practice. This definition’s integration of practical and theoretical, reality and ideal, gives it the versatility to capture nuances that may otherwise be missed, and lessens the need to continually specify that I am seeking out understandings as well as actions that contribute towards friendship. MacIntyre’s more specific definition and Dykstra and Bass’s theological nuancing of this definition in discussing practices also provide guidance. The criticism, retrieval, and strengthening of authentic friendship benefits from seeing things whole at several levels and from the integration of various practices with one another.

Another way in which a focus on practical wisdom is evident within this research is in the focus on understandings, and specifically on the social imaginary. Social imaginary is a term referring to the ways in which people envision their social existence. This includes how they relate with others, the expectations that are typically met, and the deeper normative images and ideas underlying these expectations.³⁴ The ways in which we imagine our social surroundings are often carried in stories, legends, and images, rather than in theoretical terms.³⁵ The imaginary is transmitted socially. It is also a vision “of and for social life,” in that it draws on and creates a tacit understanding of what counts as human flourishing and as meaningful relationships.³⁶

For Charles Taylor, the term social imaginary includes a sense of the typical expectations people have of one another and the sort of common understandings that enable participants within a community to carry out the collective practices that make up their social life.³⁷ Within a specific social imaginary, certain practices make sense, while others do not and are excluded. Variations in the practice of friendship in various cultures may be attributed towards variations in the social imaginaries of these cultures, as well as to the inter-related dynamics of geographic and social mobility.³⁸

It is also possible that the social imaginary may be, or become, diseased. Indeed, as theologian Willie Jennings laments, although Christianity offers “a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and act the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging,”³⁹ much of Western Christianity “lives and moves within a diseased social imagination.”⁴⁰ A diseased social imaginary contributes to the perpetuation of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism, and allows injustice to be perpetuated rather than addressed. While Jennings does not define social imagination, his use of this term is consistent with that of the social imaginary. Both terms point to the ways in which people envision their social existence.

The social imaginary draws on metaphors. New metaphors can reorganize our perceptions of the world and may implicitly call for transformation.⁴¹ Further, the social imaginary may incorporate unrealized or partially realized ideals. For example, Taylor describes the Christian gospel as generating, during the Middle Ages, the idea of a community so inspired by love for God, others, and humankind that participants were “devoid of rivalry, mutual resentment, love of gain, ambition to rule, and the like.”⁴² The expectation was that such a moral order was in the process of realization and would surely be fulfilled in the fullness of time.⁴³

While the term imaginary inherits a tendency towards“cultural abstraction,”⁴⁴ one may also speak of a social imaginary on a smaller scale, for example, a Benedictine, Presbyterian, or Pentecostal social imaginary. This term may also be used in a more person-centered manner, recognizing that learned cultural understandings are not necessarily a fixed entity fully held in common by a group. Rather, while groups may share some understandings, they may be fractured regarding other understandings.⁴⁵ Further, some understandings may be shared among those who have experienced similar “formative experiences despite living in different parts of the world” and lacking a common cultural identity. Thus, for example, a Chinese Australian Christian living