Gender Differences And The Making Of Liturgical History

Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy's past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Teresa Berger looks at liturgy's past through the lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of "men" and "women" but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men. Demonstrating what a gender-attentive inquiry is able to achieve, Berger explores both traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and also new ways of studying the past, for example by asking about the developing link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. Drawing on historical case studies and focusing particularly on the early centuries of Christian worship, this book ultimately aims at the present by lifting a veil on liturgy's past to allow for a richly diverse notion of gender differences as these continue to shape liturgical life.

The richness of recent research on women's worship gives witness to the scholarly interest in its contemporary practice, reflection, and construction. On the other hand, feminist scholarship has had little impact on liturgical historiography. In Women's Ways of Worship Teresa Berger reconstructs liturgical history from the perspectives of women. She shows that the invisibility of women in the traditional liturgical narrative draws into question the credibility of that narrative, especially at a time when research into women's history has unearthed much material relevant to women's liturgical lives. Berger focuses on thirteen key interpretative principles that guide the reconstruction of women at worship - from a re-configuration of the canon of sources and a re-Visioning of liturgical periodization to re-interpretation of anthropological basics and of liturgical texts. On the basis of these principles, she analyzes liturgical dynamics in two time periods crucial to the history of women at worship: the early centuries of the Christian Church and the twentieth-century liturgical renewal. Within the twentieth-century liturgical renewal, Berger focuses on two specific foci of renewal: the classical liturgical movement of the first half of the century, and - as a case of history-in-the- making" - the women's liturgical movement of the present day. Women's Ways of Worship narrates both past and present liturgical developments from the perspectives of women's lives, heeding such dynamics as the genderization of liturgical space, women- specific liturgical taboos, gender-specific devotional practices, and the emergence of feminist liturgies. An epilogue confronts the question of a future liturgy "beyond gender." Convinced that reconstructing the history of women at worship will offer a new Vision of the place of the women's liturgical movement within liturgical history as a whole, Berger puts this movement on a continuum of women at worship, which is a continuum of struggle against the historic marginalization of women in most liturgical contexts. As this struggle has come to the forefront today, Women's Ways of Worship provides a context for change, with women themselves being agents of both the questioning and the transformation. Chapters are "Reconstructing Women's Ways of Worship: In Search of Methodological Principles," "Liturgical History Re-Constructed (I): Early Christian Women at Worship," "Liturgical History Re- Constructed (II): Women in the Twentieth-Century Liturgical Movement," and "Liturgical History in the Making: The Women's Liturgical Movement." Teresa Berger is associate professor of Ecumenical Theology at the Divinity School of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She is the author of numerous books and contributor to a variety of journals including Worship, published by The Liturgical Press. "

This book calls attention to the importance of scholarly reflection on the writing of liturgical history. The essays not only probe the impact of important shifts in historiography but also present new scholarship that promises to reconfigure some of the established images of liturgy’s past. Based on papers presented at the 2014 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference, Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s seeks to invigorate discussion of methodologies and materials in contemporary writings on liturgy’s pasts and to resource such writing at a point in time when formidable questions are being posed about the way in which historians construct the object of their inquiry.

Christian churches in recent decades have taken some steps in their practices of liturgy and worship toward acknowledging the graced dignity of human variety. But who is still excluded? What pernicious norms still govern below the surface, and how might they be revealed? How do texts, gestures, and space abet and enforce such norms? How might Christian assemblies gather multiple expressions of human difference to propose through Christian liturgy patterns of graced interaction in the world around them? Liturgy with a Difference gathers a broad range of international theologians and scholars to interrogate current practices of liturgy and worship in order to unmask ways in which dehumanizing majoritarianisms and presumed norms of gender, culture, ethnicity, and body, among others, remain at work in congregations. Together, the chapters in this collection call for a liturgical practice that recognizes and rehearses the vivid richness of God’s image found in the human community and glimpsed, if only for a moment, in liturgical celebration. They point a way beyond mere inclusion toward a generous embrace of the many differences that make up the Christian community. With contributions from Rachel Mann, Teresa Berger, Susannah Cornwall, Miguel A. DeLa Torre, Edward Foley, W. Scott Haldeman, Michael Jagessar, Bruce T. Morrill, Kristine Suna-Koro and Frank Senn. Foreword by Ann Loades.

This interdisciplinary study explores Marian imagery and representations in world literature and art throughout the centuries, demonstrating the widespread deep veneration of the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in various countries and different Christian traditions.

How are we to proclaim Christ in different cultures? This question was central to a landmark study on worship and culture conducted by the Lutheran World Federation between 1992 and 1999. Much has changed in the years since then: the world today more than ever is a multicultural global village. Worship and Culture revisits that LWF study and publication, shedding new light on the question from recent theological and sociological scholarship to expand and enrich the texts in the original three-volume work. This book includes texts from the main statements that came out of the original project as well as updated essays from some of the original contributors. It also adds new essays, prayers, and hymns to the conversation, inviting readers to consider what the life of the church should look like in today’s hybrid, multicultural world. Contributors Julio Cezar Adam Scott Anderson Mark P. Bangert Thomas F. Best Stephen Burns Anscar J. Chupungco, OSB Joseph A. Donnella II Norman A. Hjelm Margaret Mary Kelleher, OSU Dirk G. Lange Gordon W. Lathrop Anita Monro Martha Moore-Keish Melinda A. Quivik Gail Ramshaw S. Anita Stauffer Benjamin M. Stewart Glaucia Vasconcelos Wilkey Joyce Ann Zimmerman, CPPS

How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for communal worship. The author of this provocative new book takes a hard look at these assumptions through a detailed ethnographic study of an unusual religious community where more than half the congregants live with diagnoses of mental illness, many coming to the church from personal care homes or independent living facilities. Here, people’s participation in worship disrupts and extends the formal orders of worship. Whenever one worships God at Sacred Family Church, there is someone who is doing it differently. Here, the author argues, the central elements and the participation in the symbols of Christian worship raise questions rather than supply clear markers of unity, prompting the question, What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart? Based on three years of ethnographic research, The Disabled Church describes how the Sacred Family community, comprising people with very different mental abilities, backgrounds, and resources, sustains and embodies a common religious identity. It explores how an ethic of difference is both helped and hindered by a church’s embodied theology. Paying careful attention to how these congregants improvise forms of access to a common liturgy, this book offers a groundbreaking theology of worship that engages both the fragility and beauty revealed by difference within the church. As liturgy requires consent to difference rather than coercion, an aesthetic approach to differences within Christian liturgy provides a frame for congregations and Christian liturgists to pay attention to the differences and disabilities of worshippers. This book creates a distinctive conversation between critical disability studies, liturgical aesthetics, and ethnographic theology, offering an original perspective on the relationship between beauty and disability within Christian communities. Here is a transformational theological aesthetics of Christian liturgy that prioritizes human difference and argues for the importance of the Disabled Church.

Where are the women in liturgical history? In considering the influential liturgical movement in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, Katharine E. Harmon reveals that the reality is analogous to Matthew's account of the crucifixion of Jesus: "there were also many women there" (Matt. 27:55). In this groundbreaking study, Harmon considers women's involvement in the movement. Here, readers explore the contributions of Maisie Ward, Dorothy Day, Catherine deHueck Doherty, Ade Bethune, Therese Mueller, and many others. Harmon shows how movements and institutions such as progressivism, Catholic women's organizations, Catholic Action, the American Grail Movement, and daily Catholic family life played a prominent role in the liturgical renewal. The historical record is clear that women were there, they ministered to the Mystical Body, and their important work must be recognized.