For this month’s episode of the Daily Theology Podcast, I spoke with Professor Jessica Coblentz. We talk about the influence of Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved on her path to studying religion, her research on theology and depression, and thinking theologically about suffering. We focus especially on her book, Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression, which I recommend you all go out and get after you listen to the episode (you can order it direct from the publisher here or from the behemoth here).
Dr. Jessica Coblentz is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. She holds a BA from Santa Clara University, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD from Boston College. She is the author of Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression (Liturgical Press, 2022), which won the 2023 award for best book from the College Theology Society. She also co-edited The Human in a Dehumanizing World: Re-Examining Theological Anthropology and Its Implications (Orbis, 2022) with Daniel Horan, OFM.
You can also see the full transcript for this episode below.
Thanks as always to Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea for providing the music for the Daily Theology Podcast.
Transcript of Episode #51 - Jessica Coblentz
[Opening Music]
Stephen Okey: Welcome to the Daily Theology Podcast, a podcast on the craft and vocation of theology.
I'm your host, Stephen Okey.
For today's episode, I spoke with Professor Jessica Coblentz of St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. We talk about the influence of Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved on her path to studying religion, her research on theology and depression, and thinking theologically about suffering. We focus especially on her book Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression, which I recommend you all go out and get after you listen to this episode.
Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to the podcast, whether through your preferred podcast app or through Substack. Not only can you find all our past episodes on my Substack, Okeydoxy, but you can also find transcripts of all the most recent episodes there as well.
I hope you enjoy this episode, and thanks again for listening.
[Music Transition]
Stephen Okey: So today on the Daily Theology Podcast, I am joined by Jessica Coblentz, who is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Jess, thanks for being here.
Jessica Coblentz: Thanks so much for having me, Steve.
Stephen Okey: I like to always start by asking the people I talk with, how did you get into studying theology?
Jessica Coblentz: I was always a, I like to think of it as like a, a religious kid by disposition. I grew up in a Catholic family in the Seattle area. And while I am a cradle Catholic, the family I was raised in, in the kind of broader community was not especially religious, by many of the kind of markers that, that we often associate with a kind of cradle Catholic upbringing. We didn't say grace before meals, saints weren't a part of my household. You know, we went to mass most Sundays, but once we got in the car and left the parking lot, it wasn't something that loomed large in my family life.
Despite that though, I always had this, this interest in God and spirituality. As a kid, I always felt like a sense of connection to God came easy to me, and I think because of that, as I got older and entered my kind of late teens, I became really intrigued with how other people engaged with God and religion, and I happen to have several good friends who were raised in Evangelical traditions where there was a really big emphasis on their faith and spirituality pervading every aspects of their lives.
They're waking up early to read scripture, they're going to Bible studies and youth groups. They're like, reading books about religion. And to me, this was fascinating. And in some ways, like, as an angsty teen, this manifested in, in a sort of critical perspective on my Catholic upbringing and community.
I was like, why, why aren't we reading the Bible? Why aren't more people in my parish exhibiting an investment in our Catholic life outside of mass? But ultimately, I, I just found that the best way to deal with that was to explore some of these things that my, my friends had access to.
So I started reading kind of spirituality books, C. S. Lewis and some Henry Nouwen, some other kind of popular Christian spirituality books of the day.
Stephen Okey: Was there a particular one that spoke to you or struck you in that time?
Jessica Coblentz: One of the first books that I read was Life of the Beloved by Henry Nouwen, which was recommended to me by a friend who had an older sister who was a college student and was like taking a theology class or something. So she probably encountered it there or in the college campus ministry where she was.
And the honesty of Nouwen's writing, the accessibility of it, while also being really profound, profound for me then, it's still very profound for me now, really struck me and in retrospect, now, you know, I, As, as I'm sure we'll talk about now work on mental health and religion and Nouwen wrote a lot about his struggles with mental health.
I didn't have a vocabulary for that sort of thing. Depression wasn't something that I identified with at that time, though. I think it was something I was already grappling with as a teenager. And so I'm sure there was something about encountering not only like an intellectual engagement with faith in Nouwen, but also an intellectual faith that's grappling with vulnerability and suffering and things that I was actually experiencing as a teenager, but didn't didn't have a lot of self awareness about, that probably explains why that text in particular struck me so much. But at the time, it was just the thrill of kind of grown up conversations about religion, people asking the questions and, and probing the ideas that, that I was interested in, but like, hadn't encountered many people, especially in my Catholic community who were interested in those, in like having those conversations and asking those questions together.
So that that primed me for a religious studies major when I went to college, like I was one of the few kids, sort of weird, nerdy kids who went to college thinking I want to study theology and I was a public school kid too.
So like, I, I, I'd never taken a religion class. I'd never taken a theology class. That was probably also part of the allure. I was like, I'm going to be different and cool and be weird and study this. Um. I went to Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school in the Bay Area. And my first quarter took a theology class from a wonderful historical theologian, Mick McCarthy, who's now the Dean of the STM at, Boston College.
And just was totally taken with, with the kind of intellectual rigor, of the class, but also a vision of Catholicism that he presented, you know, it was, it was a tradition that was big and complicated and diverse and seemed to be a place that had room for somebody like me who, while I was always very fascinated with religion and felt connected to God, by that time had a pretty strong sense of my own feminist identity.
I had a lot of questions about gender and sexuality in the church, and had a lot of, interest in social justice issues in the church and in broader society. And so encountering a vision of the church that could be inhabited by people who had some critical questions of the church, as well as just curiosities, I think, is what really, is what really captured me then. And, as I moved through that degree, I... it was a religious studies department, so I had theology classes and really enjoyed those and had some wonderful professors and mentors in theology, but I was also taking history of religion and sociology courses and, and things like that.
So, by the time I graduated, I, through conversations with mentors kind of had a sense that I wanted to pursue an academic career in, in religion, but I wasn't quite sure which discipline was for me. And, and that's a big reason why I ended up going to Harvard Divinity School for a master's degree.
I said, they've got all the disciplines and all the religions there. So I'll just start taking classes and see where, where it takes me. And I knew at that time that I was really fascinated with how religion could be both an incredible sort of balm, a comfort for people. It could inspire people to work for justice and do really amazing things, inspired really amazing lives, and at the same time could be a weapon, could be a source of tremendous pain in people's lives. That tension is what inspired me, but I wasn't quite sure which discipline was for me.
Stephen Okey: Was the program at Harvard, the MTS program, was it very structured? Was it sort of do whatever you want? What was it like being there, I guess?
Jessica Coblentz: It was absolutely do whatever you want. Like we, we declared a concentration when we started the master's degree, and the concentration I was admitted into was something like women, gender, sexuality, so I knew I would be taking courses around that theme.
I ended up graduating with a theology concentration because I, I pretty quickly realized that I wasn't just interested in sort of using academic tools to, to track how Christianity was helping and hurting people around issues of gender and sexuality and other kind of justice issues. I also wanted to engage in the normative work of theology where I said, okay, here's the problem. Do we have resources within the tradition to fix it?
And in the first quarter there, I took a queer theology class with Mark Jordan, I took a sort of post colonial feminist class with Susan Abraham. And between those two theologians, like I, I really came to believe that Christianity had something to offer our world.
And so I, I made the switch to theology and the rest is history.
Stephen Okey: I remember when I was an undergrad and there were, there was like a group of us who were thinking about graduate school in theology and religious studies and everything else. And so they would have these information sessions with the faculty. And I remember one of them, I can't remember which professor it was, but he was someone who did sort of like anthropology of religion. And I remember one of the things that he said was, as you're potentially discerning like a discipline or a focus, one thing to think about is what are the other things you have to do for that discipline? And so he's saying like, if you're thinking about, you know, like anthropology of religion versus theology and like the thing you want to focus on fits into both. Do you want the other things you have to do to be more anthropology tasks and disciplines or do you want them to be more theology tasks and disciplines? And it was, it was a very helpful way to think about how to kind of navigate. Cause I went to Chicago for div school and it was, it sounds like it was the same as what Harvard sounds like, where it was kind of just do what you want, take what you want, and basically after a certain number of credits, you're done
Jessica Coblentz: Mm
Stephen Okey: and you know, good luck to you. So,
Jessica Coblentz: Yes. I don't know who it was, but I recall a mentor saying something similar to me, but they framed it in terms of like, what's the class you want to teach the rest of your life? Is it anthropology 101 or is it theology 101? And that to me made it very clear, like, oh, it's, it's theology 101. And, and actually in my Intro to Catholic Theology class, I often open the class by telling my students, like, this is the class I signed up to teach for the rest of my life when I became a theologian. So get ready. This is going to be awesome. Like, this is what I'm all about.
Stephen Okey: That's amazing. So you, you discerned that the path of theology was the way to go. You discerned that there were real resources in Catholic thought, you know, to help with responding to the brokenness of the world. And so this ultimately took you to Boston College where we met. And so what was your, I guess your trajectory when you got there?
Jessica Coblentz: I knew that I wanted to be working on suffering and theologies of suffering. I had realized that that was an entryway into this, this tension that I had become fascinated with about, like, how religion could help and hurt people, but I had so many different interests. Again, in retrospect, I think, like, this is maybe why systematic theology appealed to me, because we get to do a little bit of everything.
Like, all of the sources are relevant, new ideas, relevant, like, it can encompass so many different things. But early on as a, as a doctoral student, I thought, oh, I'll do something around kind of queer and feminist theologies and kind of constructions of sexual identity and theological anthropology.
And every semester, it seemed like it was something different, always around kind of gender and sexuality. But I mean, one of the, the great successes of, of my training at BC was that it introduced me to lots of different theological conversations. And, even up to the point that I was, you know, writing my dissertation proposal, there were a lot of different directions I could go in.
I did not expect that I would write something on mental health and depression, which is what I ended up doing, although that work, again, I think reflects this interest in, in suffering that I had always been circling around in one way or another. But it, it was really my own, unfortunate mental health crisis in the midst of all this that really changed my trajectory of study.
Stephen Okey: Did you, in the process of thinking through that project as a dissertation, did you find, maybe generally or specifically, that, faculty, fellow students were supportive of it as a theological project? Were they sort of suspicious of it? Like, how is this, you know, is this real theology, that sort of thing? How did navigating that, I guess, go for you?
Jessica Coblentz: I, even before presenting depression or or mental health issues more broadly as something that I wanted to take on in the dissertation, had already come to be very anxious about this question of legitimacy that you're raising. So nobody had to raise it directly in relation to this topic for me to already anticipate it.
Yeah, I think 1 of the unfortunate sort of burdens that I experienced from very early on as a woman in Catholic theology was that
Stephen Okey: Mm hmm.
Jessica Coblentz: you know, mentors even just told me like you, you know, people are not going to take you as seriously because you are a Catholic woman and you need to just know that and anticipate that.
And I think hearing that early on helped me in some ways, in other ways, I think it, it hurt me. It made me concerned about things
Stephen Okey: it's a real. mixed bag, yeah.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah. So it was something I was concerned about as I was thinking about this dissertation topic, but it was something I was concerned about with every dissertation topic that I was considering.
Yeah. Anything that looked like a sort of quote unquote, contextual theology, one that was arising from lived experience, I suspected would get some pushback no matter who the theological interlocutors were that I was bringing that experience into conversation with, but I was really lucky to have an incredible dissertation director in Shawn Copeland.
I was drawn to work with her because of her work. I saw it as a model, as somebody who was, as I said, you know, doing this work that was deeply grounded in lived experience and lived experiences of suffering, but was rigorous and creative, and she was a hundred percent receptive to the kind of constructive work on depression that I was proposing.
And I think her, her support made all the difference for me. She believed in the project, I think more than, more than I did at times. and, and that gave me, I think, permission to be brave.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. I mean, I asked the question in part because, I went in, I wanted to do stuff, more stuff with sort of pop culture and theology, and technology and theology. And I have this, I think this was before you got to BC, but I, I had this very scarring, formative experience in the, the systematics colloquium when I had to present the first time, and a scholar who is no longer at BC, really tore into this paper that I had given, and some of the critique was legitimate, like full on and, and was, it was helpful.
And some of it was just this sort of like almost personal, working out of, I have a definition of what counts as theology, and this does not fit in those bounds. And, I, I have maybe , too capacious a vision of what counts for theology, maybe, I don't know. But it was certainly broader than, than this scholar's.
Uh, and I, I've always sort of struggled with this, people sometimes, you talk about like, you know, contextual theologies, like there's that sort of way that people dismiss things that aren't serious, classic, traditional, whatever. And then there's also just like, what, what are the important questions that matter?
And that's always framed in terms of like, but, but matters to who, like,
Jessica Coblentz: Yes. Can I ask you, Steve, has that changed the way that you teach and mentor students? Because on one hand I get that, especially at the graduate level, part of the training is to help initiate the student into particular conversations, particular questions to help them understand the boundaries of the discipline, the ways of thinking. That's part of the task of theological training it seems to me. On the other hand. I mean, we're both talking about experiences of policing that actually like squelches. interests potentially and creativity and certainly for me, like fed insecurity and doubt.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I think so, and I think in two ways. One is, I often, when I talk about theology with, especially with undergraduates, I talk about it in terms of, purpose, meaning, faith, like what these things sort of mean. And I, present it often in terms of particular ways of asking questions that are connected to particular traditions.
And part of the, the David Tracy in me is you're always talking about a context and a tradition together, and things like, for me, technology, and for your work, mental health, are part of a context, and so they're, they're absolutely fair game. The other way I think it's affected me is I try very conscientiously to attend to like what are the things that I am projecting into a conversation
Jessica Coblentz: Hmm.
Stephen Okey: I will also tell people if I mentor them, you know, in a more direct way, I have my own, you know, questions, issues, biases.
I will try to be explicit about them when I can. But also please feel free to highlight them if you see something that I'm not. Because I don't know, I don't fully know myself in the way that other people can know me, and so I'll even tell people, it's like, I'm gonna give you this piece of advice, this is why I think this is good advice, if I think there's a way in which this advice I might be just giving to benefit myself, this is what that would probably be, um, so take, take that for what it, for what it is, and, I don't know, it helps.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah. I, yeah, I think that's kind of self reflection is so important and just being explicit about it, I think can give students or, or other people, that you're advising permission to think for themselves while also considering your advice. That seems really important and it was in my experience, certainly.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. I think something that people who were really effective mentors for me, it's not that there's not a question about what is theology and what is not. And, I mean, I feel like the years I was at BC, like we often had presentations that were some version of like, what is systematic theology?
And so it was totally a fair question. Like, and I love it and it's worth asking. But there was a difference between people, both professors and fellow students who were approaching it as a question and then answers to be defended versus people who approached it as a castle that you were not allowed into.
And I think that that made a big difference for me as well, was like, recognizing who are the people who actually want to mentor you into something productive and fulfilling and, and fruitful for you and for the church, rather than, you know, molding you into mini me's, and so, and I tried to avoid the mini me's.
And there weren't. There weren't that many of them at BC, to be perfectly honest, in my experience, but there were some.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah, I agree. And I have found that one of the benefits of being a Catholic theologian in a small department at a small liberal arts college is that that sort of disciplinary policing happens a lot less,
Stephen Okey: Mm.
Jessica Coblentz: In part because, like, I teach all sorts of theology classes because there's only one kind of person doing Catholic systematic theology, and, you know, we don't have all areas covered, and so, I wear many hats, and so it's less territorial.
I also think, there is a place for those conversations, like you're saying, particularly in graduate programs where you're trying to help students. Because it, like, sort of map the discipline, but also position themselves in relation to to it. And because I don't have graduate students, I, I don't find that I have that conversation very often.
There's fun things about that conversation, like you're saying when you have it with the right people.
Stephen Okey: My undergrads don't care about clear disciplinary boundaries, I mean, I teach intro scripture, I teach intro ethics, I teach intro Christology, they don't care that I have a better background in one of those than the other. they just want me, you know, to make sense and not be so harsh in grading.
Like, that's what they want to be. And hopefully it'll be interesting in class. Like, that's what they largely want from me. And so, you know, my internal battles about, am I really a systematic theologian or not are not their big, their big questions. So,
Jessica Coblentz: Exactly.
Stephen Okey: So you did your dissertation on mental health and theology. This eventually developed into your book, is that right? Or was there, was there like a bigger change between the dissertation and the book?
Jessica Coblentz: It's a pretty big change between the dissertation and the book. I would, both are about depression and I took some of the work I had done on kind of analyzing depression narratives from a theological perspective in the dissertation and, and use that in the book, but I'm making a pretty different theological argument in the book than I did in the dissertation.
Yeah, I'd say it's like about 80 percent different. I really needed to, to marinate much more on the ideas that I was playing around with there in order for me to move forward with contentment.
Stephen Okey: How would you characterize, not like the nitty gritty, but the overall shift in, in argument and perspective between the two?
Jessica Coblentz: I think in the dissertation, , the argument is focused on soteriology, so I was trying to think about how to talk about, yeah, salvation in a context like depression, which is a condition that's often chronic and recurring, so it's not like something that is, is, is curable right now. Definitely we have treatments that can help people live good lives with depression, but it's not a sort of clear cut, you have it and then you never do again. And
Stephen Okey: It's not a miracle story from the gospel, right? Yeah.
Jessica Coblentz: And so, I, I was interested in how to think about salvation in relation to a condition of suffering like that. But I, I do have to say one of the risks of a dissertation like the one that I did, where I was engaging a topic that there hasn't been a lot of theology written about is that I felt like I could go in 1000 different directions at any given time, because there was just a lot of uncharted territory.
And so, in addition to this kind of focus on soteriology that really made up most of the dissertation, I also felt like I had, you know, some of the signs of, of, you know, my first big project where I was also trying to tackle a lot of other things along the way that didn't need to be in the book at the end of the day.
And there is some, some discussion of, of soteriology in the book, especially towards the end, but that became like a third of one chapter in the book, whereas that was the main driving, driving issue of the dissertation.
Stephen Okey: So the book is titled Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression. And I, I've been reading it, I, as I told you earlier, I haven't finished it yet, I'm still working through it. I will say from the outset, the writing is incredible. The imagery and the construction of the language is so beautiful and there's this line, it's on one of the very first pages, where you talk about guilt filled every cavity of my body.
I read that line, I was like, holy crap. I knew I was in for it. So, uh, I want to praise that up front, and for that reason, recommend it to anybody listening who hasn't already read it. But I wanted to ask you, you know, a bit about, like, what you're doing in the book, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of particular ways in which it, I don't know, hits on things that are interests or questions for me, and so there are some of the things I want to talk about. You talk a lot, for example, about the problem of suffering, or the question of suffering, maybe is a better way to put that, and depression as a, I guess, a particular form of suffering, and one thing that, in my experience reading in the Christian tradition, but also teaching the Christian tradition, is that suffering is a really mixed concept in the church.
And I have this memory from a couple of years ago now, but I was teaching a course, it's for men becoming permanent deacons, and so they would take the course and for some of them, their wives would also take the course with them, and so they were there. And I remember I was getting to this point of talking about suffering, because it was in one of the essays that we had read for that day.
And this struggle some of the students had about, on one hand, alleviating suffering as an act of charity, but also was like a task of justice. But on the other hand, the sort of Christian, common Christian image of suffering, heroic suffering, our sufferings joining us to the sufferings of Christ, all of this, and it was really difficult in that context, for me and for them, I think, to disentangle some of those issues. And so I was wondering a bit, for you and in your work, is that a question that you wrestle with, and what is an approach to that, that you have found, I guess, fruitful?
Jessica Coblentz: One of the things that made the work of the book worthwhile to me, but also so difficult for me, was this tangled web of complication that is suffering in the, in the Christian tradition and in the human experience. I remember early on when I started, really zeroing in on theologies of suffering and thinking about how I was going to position depression in relation to what was kind of already out there in kind of popular Christian thinking about depression and also more traditional Christian thinking about suffering, I remember kind of asking myself, like, is all suffering evil because we have a pretty strong, we have a pretty strong tradition of saying that it is absolutely evil and against God's will. But, but I think part of why I, like, was struck by that consistent position was because that sort of declaration alone didn't seem to capture these complexities that it sounds like your students were engaging with, which is like, yeah, we say that suffering is evil.
And when we look seriously at depression, I mean, it is an incredibly, incredibly difficult condition. There's many ways in which it seems obvious to say that it's evil and terrible. And yet,
Stephen Okey: Okay.
Jessica Coblentz: In our human experience and in the tradition we, we also have these testimonies and theologies that are affirming that good things come out of suffering often. Not, not always, and I think that's important to really emphasize. We don't emphasize that enough. But also good things come from it. God can work through it. And often that seems in tension with, with this kind of orthodox position that, that suffering is in fact evil.
So I, I was, I really struggle with that, especially at first. I was like, wait a second is suffering evil. and, and so I, I have, for my own part, when I think about my own suffering, certainly I'm, I feel much more convicted about, about the evil of my own experience of depression, for example. That said, I think taking this tension seriously in the lives of other people, in my own life, sometimes I've experienced this tension between the, the evil and the good that has bubbled up around my depression.
That, that did shape how I approached this issue in the book. I have, in the middle of the book, a couple chapters where I really grapple with how should we be talking about depression, and draw really heavily from the work of Karen Kilby, whose reflections on like, talking about suffering really blew my mind, because I think she really challenged me to think about the importance of people interpreting their own suffering.
She kind of talks about this as like a 1st person 1st person theology, is like talking about my experience and and, making room for people to reflect on some of these complexities that your students are naming rather than doing what theologians often do, which is we say like, Oh, we've already got this figured out.
Like, this is what the tradition says about this. So like, regardless of, you know, regardless of the horror that you're experiencing in this suffering, like the tradition says it's all for the glory of God or regardless of the goodness that, that somehow you are experiencing in the midst of your suffering, it is evil and therefore you're not allowed to talk about anything good coming from it. I really felt convinced, the more I did work on depression that I needed to find a way to talk about it theologically that made room for these complexities that, that are very real in people's experience and that I think our tradition has room for.
Stephen Okey: I had a student, years ago now, an undergraduate, she's a Catholic convert, is real on fire, you know, lots of zeal, and also had, like, she had some significant mental health issues, and I remember, for her, there was this, really significant, you know, lightbulb moment when she encountered, I forget what text it was in it, honestly, it might have been the catechism, remembering her, where it makes this connection to, having mental health issues is not a result of sin and evil, like that you are responsible for, and, you know, sometimes the way that we, that Christians will talk about, you know, mental health and things like that, or, or other kinds of illness, there's this kind of, especially, well, I think probably especially mental health, there's a sort of unreflected, why did you do this to yourself, a kind of sense of things, or like, you know, what caused this and why is that your fault, and it's really difficult to talk about, in the sense of, this is a thing that is a problem, it is contrary in real ways to the flourishing of God's people, but it's also not sin in the sense of you personally are responsible for this condition you find yourself in.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah, I think that's so, it's so important that this message that you are responsible for your depression, that you must be doing something wrong if you are depressed, that cannot be the only narrative that we offer our students and our, our faith communities when it comes to, when it comes to depression and it's hugely prevalent, hugely prevalent.
That said, one of the things that I was really challenged to do as I, as I progressed in this work was also to take seriously the fact that people are clinging to that story about depression, potentially for a reason.
Maybe it is because it's the only sort of Christian framework for depression that they've ever received, in which case, I think part of our work as theologians is to give them other available frameworks for thinking about conditions like this, but also, to take seriously, at least the possibility that a, that a framework like that might be doing a lot of work for people who are really desperate.
Um, right? Like, like saying that depression is a sin that I'm responsible for affirms that I have some hope of getting out of it. if it was my fault in the 1st place, then it must be my fault to get over it. Or there's a possibility that for some people can, like, be a more hopeful message than other messages that they're getting, other hopelessness that they're feeling, and so while, like, yeah, that kind of framework is certainly not how I think about my depression. It's not one that I'm going around evangelizing to other people, I've sort of been chastened, especially in talking to some students who do really find a message like that empowering to be, like, What, what is it in that message that, that rings true to you? And can I be curious about that? Cause that actually might be very revelatory.
Stephen Okey: That's interesting. I, I teach ethics a lot with undergrads and a sort of parallel conversation that emerges often for me with my students is around the concept of regret and for a lot of traditional college-age students, and I don't think this is new, I think this is common around, you know, people of that age for many generations now, there's this idea of, like, having no regrets. And even the bad things that happened to me, or the bad things I did, I don't regret them. And it's framed in terms of, usually, because that helped make me who I am, or I learned from it, or it made me What I am now in some sense, and I'm always struck by this line of argumentation because I am a person who has regrets like I,
Jessica Coblentz: Me too, Steve.
Stephen Okey: I don't always understand what it is doing for someone to assert that they have no regrets like there's that question, which I'm taking from what you were saying, but it also, it strikes me that my, like, default read of the question of regret is Thomas Aquinas on the problem of evil, right? Like, good things can come out of bad things. It doesn't mean they weren't bad. And all things being equal, it would be better if the bad thing hadn't happened, even though good came out of it.
And so I'll sometimes ask students, and again, I ask them hypotheticals. In my experience of teaching undergrads, anytime I use a hypothetical, the goal is always then to break the hypothetical. Like, where are the cracks in it? It's like, you know, not really the point, but okay, I'll, I'll play your little game.
But I asked him, it's like, you know, if you could have learned that lesson without getting in a car accident, would you prefer that option to this other option? And it's not exactly a fair question, because we don't get to live the multiverse of ourselves, but I was thinking about this as I was reading your book, too, in terms of the way that, just like, things for which we are definitely responsible in terms of our actions, things like mental health shape us who we are, and so you even talk about how you could not have written this book the way that you did without your own experience of depression, and so there's clearly good that comes out of, that came out of that suffering. But there's also a sort of unanswerable question about, wouldn't you also have preferred not to have that experience?
And it's not a thing that we can actually do, but it was a thing that struck me in terms of a sort of parallel to a set of questions that is actually a moral question about how you should act and not act. So, that was something that I'm also, I don't know, I'm still thinking through.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah, I mean, for my part, I, I feel pretty clear eyed that I would rather have not had depression than to have written this book. And I'm thankful that I've survived it and have learned to live well. I don't know if the right, the right phrase is in spite of it, I, I think it maybe is in spite of it in many ways, and have made something of my life because of the depression.
But to me that doesn't, I don't feel like my book is a redemption of the suffering in any way. That's, that's not my experience. And. Intellectually, I think I, I, I have some qualms with that kind of statement too. Yeah, I, I would hope that I could express different important insights about depression, without having had that experience or that somebody else would. And this is actually something that I think at least makes my experience of depression different than other forms of suffering.
Like, you know, I'm not a parent, but I often hear from my friends, who like you, Steve, are parents and parent like parenting is really hard. It often sounds really frustrating. In many ways it causes some forms of suffering in people's lives. But I think talking about the goods that come from the suffering of parenting maybe seemed different than the goods that I have experienced because of my depression.
And one thing I hope, well, that I think theology, one thing I think that suffering demands is that theologians keep working on how to parse these different types of suffering.
Stephen Okey: Mmhmm.
Jessica Coblentz: We get into trouble when we, I think group them all together and treat them as if they were the same.
I mean, that's why, enlightenment approaches to theodicy have been so highly criticized is this idea that, you know, everybody's experience of everything is all just the same. Therefore, our universal theories will suffice. I think we've come to a point where that's clearly not the case.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I think that's helpful. I mean, yeah, there's absolutely different kinds of suffering and you refer to Metz's work early on and like what he's thinking about is the Holocaust, which is such a fundamentally different set of contexts and responsibilities and forms of suffering.
And so there's, you know, there's some vocabulary that pulls from, or grammar that pulls from that that's useful, but, it's not at all directly applicable.
I will say, I would be so happy if my toddler could learn certain things without causing her or me suffering, I would prefer that.
Uh, than, you know, the sort of status quo on some days. But, you know, she's really cute. And so I, I let it slide, I guess.
Jessica Coblentz: She is pretty cute.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, this is really helpful for thinking about this. The other parallel I sometimes think about, and this goes back to those students who were struggling with this question about suffering, is because we were, we actually were doing a course on Catholic social teaching, or was it, no, it wasn't Catholic social teaching, it was moral theology, but we, because of my own interests that it often sort of like feeds into, you know, applied questions.
And I had sort of asked them about, is there a parallel between, you know, suffering as something potentially good, redemptive, joined to the Lord versus suffering that is unredemptive or, or should be alleviated, I guess in a real way. And I asked them what about poverty? And, you know, on one hand, we have this sort of sense in the Catholic tradition of justice in making sure people have not just what they need to survive, but what they need for some basic level of thriving and flourishing in this world. But then we also, we have the Franciscans, who voluntarily select a life of poverty.
And who would say they're able to flourish with not owning things. Like, I mean, I know that's part of it. But this sort of speaks to, there is a difference in, as you were saying earlier, the, the meaning and the narrative that someone gives to their own experience has a certain authority that cuts through sort of overarching, like if you say kind of enlightenment ways of, you know, looking at a total system.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah. I mean, this is, very appropriately for an example based in a class on, on moral theology, raising the question for me, the perennial question of what is a good life? Like, what is the good life that God intends for us? And I think some of these scenarios really push us to think about our biases, our assumptions when it comes to that and to reevaluate them.
Yeah. Like, is, is there a difference between good poverty that is conducive to the kind of flourishing that God wants for us? Is there bad poverty? Is it all bad? What makes the difference? I found, as I was working on depression that very similar questions, were coming up for me. And part of that is because a lot of the work in theology that has been done in or on mental illness has been done under the umbrella of disability studies, where these kinds of questions are particularly important, where people are saying, like, you know,
For example, like autism.
Autism doesn't hurt. What hurts is living in a world that stigmatizes autism, doesn't accommodate it, doesn't celebrate it, right? So it's not that autism is bad, it's that we live in a world that doesn't affirm it and, and refuses too often. Whereas I think, like, I, I found in my own thinking, depression is a little bit different.
Depression, as I understand it, by definition, hurts. So even when there are livable forms of depression, even when people experience a really good life amid depression, as I have come to, depression still hurts inherently, in a way that some other, some other conditions don't, and I think for that reason, like, for me, it's hard to say in my own experience that I've ever, ever known anything like good depression.
I, I just don't, it doesn't, it's not conducive to what I understand God to want for, for me and for others.
Stephen Okey: yeah. That's really helpful. So I wanted to transition a little bit. This is another question that I struggle with a little bit and I have for years as a teacher, and it has to do with students and mental health. So number one, I, I have no mental health training, and do not feel remotely qualified to help students in this regard.
And I, I mean, we have a counseling center and I, you know, I refer out and everything, I do what I can. And it hasn't been as obvious to me how much things, how much pandemic and lockdowns and working from home and school, remote school have affected my students because I haven't had as many courses, and so I don't have like a great data set in my own particular context.
But the general sense from people is that that was generally bad for the mental health of most people. And I'm curious about, for you, as a teacher at a small Catholic liberal arts school, and especially you teach at an all women's school, and you teach and write on mental health in the context of theology. My guess is this comes up a lot in real personal ways with students, and I'm just wondering, how do you manage it? How do you handle it?
Jessica Coblentz: It does come up all the time, in some ways that are probably not that different than from what you're experiencing because of the prevalence of this. And one thing I've thought a lot about is how this is In my area of expertise, I've done a lot of studying around this. I have personally received a lot of therapy that's given me like frameworks and tools for thinking about these things in my own life.
I have the empathy of, of first hand experience and yet this is incredibly difficult and overwhelming for me to, to deal with as a professor. And so I think this is just something that all of us in, in our own ways are trying to figure out because the problem of student mental health is so big and daunting right now.
I do make a point at the beginning of my classes when I introduce myself to tell students a little bit about my research, even if it's a class that has nothing to do with mental health. I often mention it and and, you know, tell them that, you know, if you ever want to talk about theology and mental health, I'm always game.
And I think, I can only imagine that because I identify as a person who is concerned about these issues, students would feel all the more comfortable talking to me about them.
I think one of the things I think about a lot that my own experience with mental health struggles has afforded me, perhaps uniquely, is that I think I feel a little bit more competent asserting boundaries with students around this.
And I say that because I, I've spoken with other colleagues who share this concern for student mental health. So one, like, we wanna do everything we can to give students the accommodations that they deserve and need. We wanna get them help. We want to extend grace to them while they're dealing with these really big struggles.
But I find that sometimes students, are really good at expressing their struggles. They're good at expressing their need for accommodations, right? And I mean, that in the broadest sense, everything from, like, just a little bit more emotional support, other resources on campus to, like, extensions on papers and things like that. A little more time for assignments.
But, but students, especially who are really enthusiastic about doing well in school and who want to please their teachers and who have sacrificed a lot to be in college aren't always skilled in recognizing their own limits. And so I think one thing that I try and help students reflect on is maybe because of mental health struggles, you're so far behind in this class that the solution isn't that I give you permission to make up the last two months of work while you're dealing with these incredibly daunting issues, but rather, let's talk about maybe withdrawing from the class and trying again in another time after you've gotten help, after you've gotten better.
And I think I try to invite students to think about their limits and kind of take actions accordingly, in part because that's what I had to do at one point in in my doctoral studies. Like, I delayed my comprehensive exams for a year because I couldn't read. And that was a really, really hard thing for an ambitious, committed student like me to do.
And I'm thankful that there were a couple people at BC who, who told me like, do what you need to do and I won't think less of you. And so that's something I try to offer students in addition to, of course, doing what I can to attend to their kind of more common and obvious asks.
Stephen Okey: That's really helpful. I often, it doesn't happen very often for me, but when I do, I often sort of feel, I feel just very unsure of what to do, other than be, try and be compassionate and respectful, you know, obviously, but, yeah, that's really helpful to think about actually,
Jessica Coblentz: Well, and maybe this is romantic of me, Steve, but I also don't think you or any of us should underestimate how much that kind of compassion matters. I say that out of my own experience, the people who were really compassionate towards me and extended me sort of unconditional support are the people who like have left a mark on my soul more than any lesson they taught me in a classroom. But also I think like, when I talk to parishes about mental health issues, I often get this question of like, what can we do on the parish level? Like which ministries, which programs, what's the stuff we need to learn and how do we learn it?
And one thing I often kind of find myself saying in response is there's so much to learn. There's, there's always more to learn, cause there's always more out there that we're discovering about these conditions and how to accompany people through them. There's always more to learn. It's super important.
And yet what so many depression sufferers have communicated through the stories that I've read and the conversations I've had with them is that like, one of the things that makes the biggest difference is that like people love them through whatever they need, whatever they were going through, whatever they needed, people stuck with them and loved them while they were going through this.
And I'm like, that's something that, Christians should be primed to do. Like, we, we, we don't, we, we, like, shouldn't need a crash course in order to just extend people love in whatever circumstance it is.
In this case, it happens to be mental health, mental health struggles, but like, we don't have to be experts to love them. And, and that, that does seem to make a tremendous difference. Like it, it doesn't, it's not going to cure people, it can't be everything, but it makes a big difference.
Stephen Okey: I think it also, it helps push back against a sort of mentality, like a fix it mentality, which I think we bring to so many things in the world for understandable reasons. And so often, at least in my reading of, the Christian tradition, there's a sense of, like, you're not gonna fix all these things, like, a lot of these are, they're not fixable, you know, in this world, or they're not fixable by us, and so we're left with the less satisfying, less attractive, but probably more Christ like option of, just love them,
Jessica Coblentz: Yes.
Yes.
Stephen Okey: go from there
Jessica Coblentz: Love them, stick with them. I think you're exactly right. We live in a fix it world. One of my favorite writings by Pope Francis, I talk about this in one section towards the end of the book is from his apostolic exhortation on holiness, where he like does this beautiful reading of the Beatitudes.
And he has this little reflection on blessed are those who mourn. And it's basically just this concise, eloquent diagnosis of how uncomfortable we are with suffering in our world and how, technologies and, and news and stuff just like makes it all the easier to look away from anything that we cannot immediately fix that makes us uncomfortable.
And, and so he says, you know, holiness is. Not looking away. It is. It is accompanying those who mourn. It is mourning with those who mourn and it It struck me because it resonated as like a really hard thing to do.
Stephen Okey: One of my favorite books from the Bible is the book of Job. And part of what I love about it is beyond the theatrics and drama and the big questions, everything of it, there's this line in it that I think most people overlook because they get really focused, understandably, on the, 30 plus chapters of debate over whether or not it's Job's fault.
But when his friends first arrive, they sit in silence with him for a week. And I always feel like we're maybe a little too hard on his friends because of all the subsequent stuff. But like, and you know, they get to be critical, but like there is this real sense of just being present and with someone that I, I do think that like, I mean, it's one verse, but like it, it models this idea too.
And I, one thing I tell my students because, you know, people who are 20 years old, always lived in a time when there were smartphones or at least certainly there was, you know, widespread internet and I'll say to them, most of you have never been bored. Um, like, I mean, I'm basically never bored anymore either, cause I also, you know, I have my adult pacifier that I look at. But, but like, if you've never had that experience, like, it, it does make it, I think, harder to be empathetic in some respects. It makes it harder to be creative, I think, in a lot of ways, and it, it is something that I think, it makes a lot of our tradition a little less familiar to us, in a sense, because we don't have the, there's a kind of what I think probably was a fairly universal human experience, before 1998 or something.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We are not, we are not primed for, for boredom, for discomfort. I see that in myself. Like, yeah, the adult pacifier, exactly what you're saying.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. Before we wrap it up, I wanted to ask you, what are you working on next? Do you have a sense for where you want to go now? Are you taking a little bit of a mental break,
Jessica Coblentz: I've been taking a mental break. I think one of the ways though that I find, that I kind of refresh as a scholar is not so much by not writing. I've just gotten to a point where, like, I think on the page, I it's something I find, I find enlivening, and, and perhaps also because we live in this distraction saturated world, the work of like sitting down and focusing on reading and writing, is incredibly, almost like meditative to me.
Stephen Okey: write by hand?
Jessica Coblentz: I usually write on a computer, but if I get stuck, I will move between the computer and handwriting on a notepad. So that is a part of my practice, but I mostly write on the computer.
Stephen Okey: Mmhmm.
Jessica Coblentz: So I'm, I'm still working on some things, but I find like what's, what's restorative for me is a sense of freedom and play in my writing.
So I'm doing lots of little things right now. I have actually been surprised to find that I may have more to say about depression. When I finished the book, I was like, I will never write anything else about this again.
But one of the beauties of, of like putting the book out into the world has been like conversations like this one, where I'm actually getting to talk to people who have new and more interesting ideas than the ones that, you know, I've gotten tired of, in my own head. And so that's actually been really generative.
And I've gotten more interested in writing about gender and depression in particular, as I mentioned, like I've always been interested in gender and feminist issues and, there is all this evidence that women have long experienced depression at much higher rates than men. And now, there's increasing research on transgender individuals experiencing suicidal ideation at much higher rates than others in the population.
And so I've gotten curious about why that is and whether, kind of gender attendant theologies like feminist theology might have something to say about that and, oh, and also might be enriched by taking seriously how, like, our bodies sort of metabolize sexism and other forms of of oppression in our world.
So that's, that's one thing that I'm starting to play around with. And then I am also doing some work in queer theology, which is something I've been teaching, and just starting to publish a little more about, in particular asexuality, which I think is pushing forward the conversation in feminist and queer theory in interesting ways.
And, and which there's very little written about in Catholic theology. So I, it really does feel, feel like play for me to say like, okay, I want to think about, about Catholic stuff and this emerging branch of queer and feminist theory together and see what happens, see if there's anything here.
Stephen Okey: That's great.
Jessica Coblentz: Yeah. Thanks, Steve.
Stephen Okey: Well, Jess, I have very much enjoyed this conversation and just want to say thank you for talking with me today.
Jessica Coblentz: Thank you for having me. It's such fun.
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#51 - Jessica Coblentz