Lope Lesigues: On Play, Digital Catechesis, and God’s Park

As a young seminarian in the Philippines, Lope Lesigues became inspired by his Louvain-trained professors. When he had the opportunity to continue his studies abroad, the decision was obvious: despite scholarship offers from universities in the US and Rome, he travelled to Belgium and enrolled at KU Leuven. After obtaining his PhD, his career led him to the US, where he now combines teaching, writing, gaming, and pastoral work. 

• Could you describe in a few lines the course of your academic career since you left KU Leuven?

My academic career has been a wonderful journey and one that’s filled with blessings and challenges. Immediately after graduating at KU Leuven in 2004, I was offered a job to teach at the Philosophy Department, University of San Carlos, Philippines, on the topic Mikhail Bakhtin and Polyphonic Voices. I had barely been back in the Philippines, when I was assigned a parish on the Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. I combined this assignment with a teaching job at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Studies at Fordham University, New York. The subject matters of my lectures revolved around the areas of theological methodologies, liberation theologies, digital catechesis, and the appropriations of the thoughts of Bakhtin and Rancière on popular cultures. The academia was a nice pendant to the pastoral ministry.

One of the most challenging milestones of my career was building the infrastructure for digital catechesis. I saw the growing disinterest of children to the old-style CCD classes, and this dour phenomenon is globally widespread and depressing. One of the explanations to the alarming decline is language: we are not talking to the kids in their own language! I introduced the first-ever digital approach to the parish, and it did wonders for the children’s faith formation and the whole parish life. It was a daunting task at first because we had to build it from scratch. While the young parents and their kids were tech-savvy, the catechists and church leaders were well-entrenched in their total embrace of print culture and classroom methods. A process of re-education, adaptation and reception had to take place, and it did not happen overnight. Eventually, it worked! Our children’s enrollment increased, and the parents became more participative and engaged in the program! The program became the New Wineskin Awardee in the 2017 National Conference for Catechetical Leadership held in Dallas, Texas.

Since then, I moved on to a more advanced project, creating and developing God’s Park – a highly gamefied, catechetical app+ for grade-level children in need of faith formation. This approach has created so much interest in certain religious education quarters that I was called twice by the USCCB-Catechetical Committee (in Washington, DC and Chicago) to take a deeper look at God’s Park. Their response was very encouraging.

• How did you get interested in theology/religion and what led you to study it on an academic level?

The ‘Louvain’ professors during my seminary years in the Philippines were great influencers and mentors. I will mention Fr. Dr. Manny Ginete, C.M., in particular. His pedagogic style impressed me so much. Afterwards, I was appointed as professor at the Seminario Mayor de San Carlos, Philippines, and got the rare opportunity to become colleagues with alumni from Louvain – Drs. Aloysius Cartagenas and Ramon Echica. It was like a ‘meeting of minds.’ I taught theology to seminarians and lay students alike. That is when I realized that I needed the tools, the discipline, and the frameworks that KU Leuven can offer in order to become a better listener of cultures and a more grounded contextual theologian and philosopher.

• What are your current research interests and have they evolved much since you defended your dissertation?

My dissertation was on the subject matter of play along the binary rhetorics of scholè and agon. One development of my dissertation is in the field of gamification, which I researched for the past nine years. In the elective course entitled Digital Catechesis (which I developed for Fordham University-NY), the topic of gamification occupied a big chunk of the syllabus. In a manner of speaking, my research has reached both ends of the spectrum – the learned scholars and the neophyte learners!

A core interest of my research pertains to liberative and subaltern issues, giving a voice to the marginalized. In God’s Park, the children gain their voice. They are no longer passive, voiceless recipients of their faith formation; they become re-makers of it. GP also debunks the claim that the digital approach only creates virtual citizens. In fact, it’s rather counter-intuitive that engagement in GP makes children more involved in church life and the outside world. The adaptation lag is on the part of digital immigrants (hierarchy, church leaders), and not on the part of digital natives.

• Why did you choose to study in Louvain?

I was offered scholarships in two other universities in the US and Rome, but I specifically chose to study at KU Leuven because of its academic rigor, critical-historical methodology, and for the promise of giving me the acumen to ground my studies in practical, applied fields. I never regretted it one bit that I studied at KU Leuven, where I experienced hands-on mentorship, the cultivation of imagination, the respectability of dissent, and a sense of belongingness and support from both the academic and faith community. It felt like home. The chocolates and beers were a plus!

• Which aspect of your Louvain studies has influenced you most during your academic career?

KU Leuven made me realize there are different worlds out there. One only needs to use a different lens. And with this lens, the odd, the oblique, and the invisible show themselves. The joy of study, the lively discussions with friends, random meetings with strangers, participation in lectures and conferences, listening to street-busking or the parish choir, the back-and-forth bike-rides between the Faculty Library and my studio, the strolls from Sint-Jozef Church to the Grote Markt weren’t innocent promenades; they were rich pathways that informed my viewpoints and made me rearrange epistemic spaces and perceptible artifacts from their normalized existences, thereby, allowing fresh ingenuities to surface, hidden assumptions to be demolished, and taken-for-granted things to be seen from a different angle.

• Which (Leuven) professor had the most impact on your formation and academic career and why?

The late Prof. Dr. Georges De Schrijver was a great mentor and a true friend. I was his last dissertation student, and he guided me towards the final steps of my doctoral defense. He also directed the Centre for Liberation Theologies. My involvement with the Center created a meaningful impact on my current advocacies. But I cannot downplay the impactful role of other KU Leuven professors, like Prof. Dr. Jacques Haers, Prof. Dr. Mathijs Lamberigts, Prof. Dr. Lieven Boeve, and my ‘batch mates’, Prof. Dr. Yves De Maeseneer and Prof. Dr. Joris Geldhof. I had the great opportunity to discuss and rub elbows with these scholars. A third set of influencers were my fellow students and Louvain barkadas who were teachers in their own right. They taught me so many things that go above and beyond the theology lecture halls. They have truly enriched my academic ruminations in KU Leuven.

• Which projects have you been involved with lately and which projects are you preparing at the moment and what can you tell us about it?

Early this year I finished the publication of my book Archaeology of Play (New York, 2019). It is a 400-page project that rediscovers the Platonic-Aristotelian tripartivism in matters of play – scholé, agon, and paidia. In this book, paidiatics is the play of the lowly and the excluded, a play-world that is highly ignored by society. Bringing these lusory rhetorics to surface opens a crack for play to become a critical resource for politics, aesthetics, and the democratic reordering of sociality.

Meanwhile, God’s Park is a huge project. It was four years in the making to get where I am now, but honestly, I am barely scratching the tip of the iceberg. The potential is immense, and the development is ongoing. It is a full-curriculum program with cartoon animation videos, interactive texts, mission tasks and it employs the currency of gamification in different game logics and algorithms. Faith and fun can truly be spoken in one breath, without being disrespectful. GP is also backed up by dynamic reports, assessments, and other metrics. GP is now available on Apple and Android gadgets and on the gaming portal called WebGL (for PCs and laptops). It is downloadable in Google Play and App Store. Currently, some parishes from New Jersey and Texas, USA are lined up for piloting GP.

Interested to learn more about GP: www.godspark.world or contact lesigues@godspark.world