CHAPTER 11: SUGGESTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 275 Thomas O’Loughlin notices a lacuna in scholarly work, which urged him to write his book on sharing the Eucharist: “I could not think of a single book that presented the arguments in favor of a change in Catholic practice – the very sort of examination Pope Francis was calling for.”567 He presents several interrelated perspectives without, however, offering an exhaustive overview of the debate so far. I have presented some recent contributions in Chapter 1 in order to demonstrate the lack of empirical research in the field and to provide context for the current study. A comprehensive literary review and discourse analysis would make an interesting contribution to the debate, in which my own findings, articulating the operant theology of Taizé and Bose, could find their proper place and in which the dialogue of voices might fruitfully take place. The dialogue clearly extends beyond the discipline of practical theology. This study has initiated the exploration of systematic theological implications of the encountered practice. A more elaborate systematic theological reflection based on the outcomes of this study is needed to promote the integration this expression of the sensus fidelium into the theological debate even further. 11.3 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN GENERAL In recent decades, empirical methods have been widely adopted by practical theology. However, their use has mainly focused on describing practices in order to enable adequate theological reflection on them. Reflection or evaluation in the opposite direction is still a novelty, as I have indicated in Chapter 2. Adopting Bruce Steven’s idea of a “grounded theology,”568 this study has indeed used methodologies based on the principles of grounded theory to achieve the goal of generating theological ideas. In the language of the four voices (see section 2.2, Figure 2), this research has explored the possibility to turn what is often perceived as a monologue (theology dictating and evaluating practice) into a genuinely reciprocal dialogue. A systematic reimagination of this relation may also prove helpful, for example, by embedding it further in the notion of the sensus fidei. Valuable efforts in this direction are already made in the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network.569 567 O’Loughlin, Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking up Pope Francis’s Call to Theologians, ix. 568 Stevens, “Grounded Theology?” 569 Cf. e.g. Paul D. Murray and Mathew Guest, “On Discerning the Living Truth of the Church: Theological and Sociological Reflections on Receptive Ecumenism and the Local Church,” in
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