Introduction: Finding God in the Fieldnotes

Where is God? What locations should we turn to in order to identify God’s activity in the world? What methods would be appropriate to attend to the presence (or absence) of God? And then, once we identify God’s presence, what should we do in response? This special issue of Ecclesial Practices, compiled by the Fieldwork in Ethics interest group of the Society of Christian Ethics, highlights a dual post-liberal and liberationist inheritance, before arguing in the essays that follow, that Christian ethicists emerging from both orientations are unable to evade normative questions by turning to qualitative research. However, such an evasion was never true to our task. Instead, immersing ourselves in normative lifeworlds marked by brokenness and grace prompts us engage the grounds for ethical judgement anew: to reflect on God’s presence, the presence of God’s absence, and the persistent hope of liberation. Over the past fifteen years, field work has become an established method for such attention in Christian ethics. Book series such as the T&T Clark Studies in Social Ethics, Ethnography and Theology; distilling volumes like Anna Vigen and Christian Scharen’s Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics; and this journal Ecclesial Practice all testify to the new emergence of ethnography as an accepted method of Christian ethics.1 Ethicists no longer argue about whether ethnographic methods of participant observation,