Fondly Imagining the Liturgical Past

The Byzantine liturgical historian Robert Taft's 2000 essay, "Eastern Presuppositions and Western Liturgical Renewal" first alerted me to the uses and abuses of Christian history in service of present political agendas. It is a fascinating study in the selective appeal to "the East" by Latin liturgical reformers to give cover to what they wanted to do.

Later this year we shall have a collection of scholarly articles that continues to explore such istoriographical questions: Teresa Berger and Bryan D. Spinks, eds., Liturgy's Imagined Past/s (Pueblo Books, 2016), 320pp.

 About this book we are told:

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.

Essays on Eastern Liturgy

The Duke liturgical scholar Teresa Berger this week published a collection of essays with at least four focused on Eastern liturgy: Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace (Liturgical Press, 2012), 200pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Liturgy migrates. That is, liturgical practices, forms, and materials have migrated and continue to migrate across geographic, ethnic, ecclesial, and chronological boundaries. Liturgy in Migration offers the contributions of scholars who took part in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music's 2011 international liturgy conference on this topic. Presenters explored the nature of liturgical migrations and flows, their patterns, directions, and characteristics. Such migrations are always wrapped in their social and cultural contexts. With this in mind, these essays recalibrate, for the twenty-first century, older work on liturgical inculturation. They allow readers to better understand contemporary liturgical flows in the light of important and fascinating migrations of the past.

Mary Farag's chapter is entitled "A Shared Prayer over Water in the Eastern Christian Traditions," which is a theme attracting a lot of attention lately, not least in my friend Nick Denysenko's new book The Blessing of Waters and Epiphany: The Eastern Liturgical Tradition. I interviewed Denysenko here.

Kostis Kourelis and Vasileios Marinis author the chapter "An Immigrant Liturgy: Greek Orthodox Worship and Architecture in America."

Anne McGowan writes about "Eastern Christian Insights and Western Liturgical Reforms: Travelers, Texts, and Liturgical Luggage."

Finally, Kaye Kaufman Shelemay writes about Sounding the Challenges of Forced Migration: Musical Lessons from the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Diaspora."