Liturgical Hermeneutics
2004 New York, New York
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2004
Gil Ostdiek (professor of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago)
Seminar Participants 2004
Seminar members: (in attendance) Jack Abel, Byron Anderson, David Buley, James Caccamo, Ed Foley, Ken Hall, Larry Hoffman, Camille Jacques, Margaret Mary Kelleher, Richard McCarron, Gil Ostdiek, David Power, Kathryn Rickert, Steve Sauer, Kevin Seasoltz, Susan Smith, David Stosur, Catherine Vincie, Mark Wedig, Fritz West
Seminar Report 2004
The Seminar’s overall goal is to explore critically what liturgical celebrations mean and how we can know that. This year’s agenda focused on the interpretation of elements of worship other than prayer texts.
1. Mark Wedig, “Interpreting Worship Space Using Practical Theological Method”
In his introduction Wedig noted that use of practical theology methods is changing both his course work with doctor of ministry students and his own research. He showed how the practical methodology of Don Browning can be used to organize the task of understanding an environment for worship as praxis. He illustrated the kinds of questions about worship space that can be posed within Browning’s four basic movements: descriptive, historical, systematic, and strategic theology.
Discussion centered on several issues.
- The goal of interpretation: is it for the sake of the expert’s understanding? decision-making in the community? the building of relations in the assembly? the production of a D.Min. thesis-project, which does not necessarily return to the actual praxis of the community studied?
- Ethics: can consideration of ethics be limited to the systematic phase of the process, as Browning does, or ought it be considered in each phase?
- Voice and authority in doing an interpretation: do these belong to the practical theologian? the architect? the worshiping community? or in some measure to all of them?
- Artistic/architectural genius: what role does this play in shaping the space? is it accessible to the common intuition of all who use/study the space? or does the artist/architect bring something that is irreducibly unique?
- Culture: does Browning’s method provide adequately for the role of culture? The conversation explored various ways of using and refining practical theology method in interpreting worship space.
2. Mary McGann, “Interpreting the Musical Experience of a Liturgical Assembly”
Mary McGann joined our group for a conversation about the research method she employed in preparing her Interpreting the Musical Experience of a Liturgical Assembly (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2002). She opened the conversation with a number of observations about her work. For her, interpretation is an interdisciplinary, ongoing process that takes time. It must involve dialogue with the worshiping community at every stage. Description and interpretation require an interpretative conversation in which the community both contributes to and receives the interpretation.
The ensuing conversation with Mary explored a number of aspects of her work: the development of thick description and how to decide when it is thick enough; the need to develop a relation of trust with the community; the length of time needed to recognize one’s own cultural presuppositions and to enter fully into the community’s experience and understanding; how to use the outsider/insider tension effectively; the difficulty of translating the community’s experience into text; ways of involving the community in the interpretative process. The method she described provided the group with a new appreciation of field work and the ways in which it can be carried out.
3. Catherine Vincie, “Interpreting Art as a Theological Source”
Catherine Vincie led us into a discussion on liturgy and the arts. She noted the importance of situating liturgy in its visual, acoustic, and architectural context. We need to search for more adequate methodologies that can be employed in a hermeneutics of art. Robin Jensen’s work, Understanding Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000), offers one such method: bringing together images and texts of the tradition. Vincie illustrated this approach through images and texts for the orans figure and for the Good Shepherd. Writers frequently illustrated their prose with metaphors and Scriptural illustrations whose parallels appear in visual form in paintings, mosaics, sculpture, and other crafts. Art works and written documents emerge from the same or similar community, have common purposes or outlooks, and are best considered synoptically.
Our conversation raised several difficulties: in adequately documenting the correlation between visual and textual references; in “reading” images from tradition in light of the complexity of artistic taste and how it has changed; whether Jensen’s method is sophisticated enough. The conclusion of an all-too-brief conversation: we are only at the beginning of developing better methodological frameworks of interpreting non-textual dimensions of contemporary worship.