Beach Music.

I recently reopened Beach Music (Bantam, 1995), a novel I'd read this past summer. Grains of sand fell out on my lap. This debris from the beach was a gentle but messy reminder of those summer days spent reading at water's edge.

I've long been a fan of this book's author, Pat Conroy. When I read Beach Music, his latest novel, one sentence especially danced: "On this night, the pure fact of living seemed like a new branch of theology." It's the kind of sentence some readers underline with a ballpoint pen or highlight with a yellow Magic Marker. Calligraphers search for such sayings to render into scripted art. And collectors of proverbs and aphorisms know they are close to a mother lode when they find a quote like this one.

This sentence is a great glimpse into how contemporary theology gets formulated. We all live theology forward. Theology is both born and borne by human experience. Conroy's writing fascinates me because so many of his stories live theology forward by imaginatively expressing and reflecting on the significance of life itself.

Conroy, like other serious contemporary writers, works well with this new branch of theology known as narrative theology. Theologian and church historian Martin Marty describes it as "talking about God by telling stories of people." Narrative theology, grounded in the real world, emphasizes imaginative expressions over abstract statements.

Ultimately, this new branch of theology tosses the ball into the court of the reader's life. It challenges us to consider what nights and days in our own lives have been so significant that we have lived theology forward. By telling these stories of significance, we contribute to theology.

More than grains of sand fell from Conroy's Beach Music when I reopened it. More than this one sentence tumbled out. Narrative theology also fell into my lap.

"Odds and Ends" columnist, Peter Gilmour, is a faculty member of the Institute of Pastoral Studies, Loyola University Chicago. He can be reached in cyberspace at [e-mail]