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The Swimming Professor: An Interview with Michele Saracino


Dr. Michele Saracino, chair of the MC Religious Studies Department, spends a lot of time in the water. She’s not only an avid swimmer but her latest research project is a theology of water and relationships. It's sure to make a splash.

PF: You are a serious swimmer. Is this a new pastime for you? And how does it inform your scholarly study of water?

MS: I started swimming 2 years ago and my life personally and professionally has been transformed by it. Being in water, having a relationship with this viscous other inspires me to think about spirituality in new ways. My scholarship, the privilege of being able to teach and research about existential questions, influences every swim. I don't think of swimming as a competition even though I am fiercely competitive as anyone at the local pool will confirm! Rather it is a ritual, meditation, and even a prayer about how to live life with grace and peace.

PF: How has your experiential understanding of water changed over time?

MS: Before swimming, I only thought about the ethical connections between water and creation, meaning that the developed nations use too much and squander water resources. Now I think about encountering water as an opportunity to change one's mind about the world and their place in it. I still care about scarcity of water, just take a different approach to it.

PF: Your most recent book is on theological anthropology—about what it means to be a human person amidst the shifting sands of 21st Century life. How does your work on water relate to your work on personhood?

MS: So much of my work on Christian anthropology focuses on relationships, since Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as seeking out relationship with all sorts of diverse individuals. However, modeling Jesus' other-oriented activity requires a lot of work, particularly paying attention to how one feels about the other and how to manage complicated and sometimes negative feelings related to those different from us. My work on water imagines swimming as a metaphor for navigating thorny relationships of difference. Just like swimmers practice getting a feel for the water, Christians can develop an empathetic feel for the other.

PF: Back in the day, I took an undergraduate course on the Bible, and the professor opened the course by asking us to sum up the Bible in one word. Then he gave his own one word summation: "water." How does your work on water relate to traditional references to water in the Bible and Christian theology: creation story, the flood, parting the red sea, water from the rock, baptism?

MS: I engage in constructive theology in my work, reworking old concepts in new frames. For example, I revisit the Garden of Eden, thinking about how Christians imagine brokenness and alienation from God and others, and suggest that perhaps a more apt understanding of sin and redemption is possible in a Blue Eden. Water instead of a garden being the transformative medium par excellence for understanding the fluidity of sin, pain, and healing.

PF: What books have shaped your understanding of water? A River Runs Through It? H2O, the Sequel?

MS: I have been deeply influenced by the work of a marine biologist named Wallace Nichols. In his book The Blue Mind, he suggests that doomsday scenarios about climate change, overfishing, and other water issues related to environmental degradation are not the only way or necessarily the most productive way for emphasizing the importance of water. Instead, he urges his readers to tell their good stories about water in order to change our attitudes toward it. Reflecting on the practice of swimming is a modest effort at such a Blue Mind Story, hoping to reveal possibilities for creating better relationships with others. Likewise my work upholds the premise that not all work on water needs to be about issues of cleanliness or lack, as so much theological and ritual studies work on water has been. In fact, that kind of scholarship could get overwhelming and force some to turn off—just too negative, leaving many of us feeling paralyzed and powerless to do anything or imagine otherwise.

PF: Obviously, you are writing as theologian, but do you meditate at all on the science of water in the human body? The fact that we evolved from water dwellers? That we gestate in water? That our bodies are 50%-65% water?

MS: To be sure, these are all implicit ideas in my essay, which if developed into a book or course would most definitely be pushed and explored.

PF: Does the study of water ever make you thirsty?

MS: Sometimes. Like right now I am pretty thirsty. But mostly it makes me happy.

[i] Wallace J. Nichols, The Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014),

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