Resources

“Prospects of Historic Christian Liturgy in a Postmodern Age”
Director: Bryan D. Spinks, The Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University

Christian worship has often been a remarkable and instructive window into the culture of the communities which offer it, reflecting both a given community's most cherished beliefs as well as unstated cultural dynamics. In the latter part of the twentieth century, encouraged by the Vatican II reforms in the Roman Catholic Church, most Western churches revised and revolutionized their inherited forms of worship. In this liturgical movement, the so-called classical period of the fourth and fifth centuries has been regarded as a golden age, and scholarly reconstructions of the texts of this period have become the basis for many of the revisions. However, those revisions coincided with the rise of postmodernity, with its criticisms of the "objective" scientific and historical method of modernity that had formed the backdrop of many of those new worship books. Are those worship forms, concentrating on texts and structures, now just a monument to modernity? What are the challenges of postmodernism to theology and worship? What are the ingredients for worship in a postmodern culture? The overarching goal of the seminar was both to understand the current status of liturgical reform efforts as well as to raise broader questions about how we appropriate Christian liturgical history in current discussions.

Participant Projects

• Are Bach's Cantatas the Praise and Worship Music of the Eighteenth Century?  by Joseph Herl
• Prospects of Historic Liturgy in a Post Modern Culture  by Michael Kesar
• Perception, Presence, and Sacramentality in a Post-Modern Context  by Judith M. Kubicki
• Playing the Discarded Image Card  by Paul Lehninger
• Baptizing the Nations: Mission, Culture, and Liturgy in the Gospel of Matthew  by Laurence C. Sibley, Jr
• A 'Century of Progress'? Worship and Church Building Design in the Twentieth Century  by Mark A. Torgerson
• "The body of our humiliation" (Phil 3:21): Historical and Scriptural Notes on Liturgy as an 'End' of the Church  by Christopher Wells