Liturgy and Postmodern Questions
2005 Louisville, Kentucky
2005 | 2004
Convener 2005
Dirk G. Lange (assistant professor of Christian assembly, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia)
Seminar Participants 2005
Claudio Carvalhaes, James Farwell, Siobhan Garrigan, Bruce T. Morrill
Visitor: Andrew Wright
Seminar Report 2005
This was the first year that the Liturgy and Postmodern Questions Seminar met. We launched the seminar with energetic discussion and a deep mutual understanding around the issues of language and rites. Despite the great diversity in topic matters presented (the naming of God, rites of pastoral care for the sick, art/theater in liturgy, a new Eucharistic hermeneutics), discussion had to be curtailed each time because of an underlying consensus and unspoken desire to ask the same difficult questions about the words we use, the terminologies we are subject to (and their implicit goals), and the presuppositions we ourselves are making. The learning from each presentation was intense. We ended this year’s meeting with a lengthy discussion of Farwell’s paper, written specifically for this seminar group. One of the questions facing the seminar was the direction we wished to pursue for future meetings. This question is closely tied up with the definition given to the term “postmodern.” Farwell’s paper outlined different approaches to the term “postmodern” and mapped out for us possible trajectories for the seminar. A shared perception of the postmodern adventure as “critical consciousness” came to expression, as well as our deep commitment to the search for a “new language” with which to study not only liturgical theology but also the whole theological enterprise.
Papers
Claudio Carvalhaes, “‘Come Spirit Come’—On Art and Reformed Faith.” This paper is guided by the question about the relation between art and liturgy—how can art relate to our ways of worshiping God? Art is approached not as simply “worship enhancement,” but as disruption, interruption, and even disfiguring of faith. Puppetry and theater are explored to enable a new “seeing.” Through this exploration the paper also wishes to open an-other way for reformed faith to understand and practice art.
James Farwell, “The Study of Liturgy and Postmodernism: Conceptual Clarity, Methodology, and Possible Lines of Inquiry.” This paper mapped several uses of a cluster of terms—postmodern, postmodernity, postmodernism—and clarified some key differences between cultural and philosophical postmodernism. A brief observation on methodology was accompanied by the identification of several philosophical-postmodernist themes of relevance to the study of liturgy: the contrast between modernist and liturgical approaches to memory, the absence accompanying presence, the travail of narrative, and the priority of ethics over ontology.
Siobhan Garrigan presented a paper with the same title as her forthcoming book, The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Finding Words for the Postmodern God, in which she used social theories of radical intersubjectivity on the one hand, and practices of art-making on the other, to propose a new concept of liturgical—and thus, theological—naming. According to such a view, naming is a constant process of interaction within the liturgical assembly which draws on a wide range of context-contingent vocabularies and is structured in such a way as to come to an understanding with God.
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J., “Postmodern Analyses of Illness: Implications for Word and Sacrament in the Pastoral Care of the Sick.” Morrill brought key features of social-literary analyst David Morris’s biocultural model of contemporary illness and biblical scholar John Pilch’s cultural-anthropological studies of healing in the gospels to bear on a number of questions about the theology, official regulation, and pastoral practice of the current rite for anointing the sick in the Roman Catholic Church.
Dirk G. Lange, “Eating, Drinking, Sending: Reflections on the Juxtaposition of Law and Event in the Eucharist.” Rather than approaching Eucharistic theology through a particular lens—philosophical or theological—this paper explores one phrase in Luther’s writings to discover a hermeneutic embedded within the Eucharistic celebration itself. Eucharist is considered as event which disrupts all forms of remembering.
For next year’s meeting, we are excited about studying and preparing written responses to the book of one of the most provocative trauma theory thinkers: Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.