Can the Theological Ethnographer Pray?

Abstract In academic theology, prayer is often relegated to the theologian’s private life.1 What happens when prayer is integrated in a theologian’s ethnographic research, challenging this divide? In this paper, I explore my experience of reading my own interview transcriptions from research with women in Palestine, utilizing the practice of lectio divina . This form of contemplative prayer forces the reader to slow down and meditate on the text, rather than solely engaging the transcription through an analytical frame. In this way, the words of the interview transcription are engaged as more than information and data; in the context of contemplative prayer, the insights of those I spoke with mediate God’s presence. I further suggest that lectio divina encourages the researcher to continue to encounter her ‘informants’ as full persons, even during the ‘analysis’ stage of her project, as well as calls her to grapple with how this (re)encounter with the interviewee in the transcription may require her to move beyond writing to engage in concrete acts of solidarity.