LiturgyPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026696
Ester Pudjo Widiasih, Rasid Rachman
{"title":"Reshaping Liturgy in Postcolonial Indonesia","authors":"Ester Pudjo Widiasih, Rasid Rachman","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026696","url":null,"abstract":"Hybridity is a distinctive feature in the Sunday worship of Indonesian churches. The churches have adopted the liturgies and theologies of eurocentric Christian traditions introduced by the missionaries: Roman Catholics, various Protestants, Anglicans, and the Orthodox. At the same time, churches draw on their own ethnicity’s cultural elements. Here is a description of Sunday worship in a Javanese Reformed congregation: The basic liturgical order follows the missionary’s liturgy with some adjustments. The entire liturgy is conducted in Bahasa Indonesia (the national language), but the Bible readings are in Javanese or other ethnic languages. A wide variety of congregational songs are sung in Bahasa Indonesia or Javanese. Some songs are locally composed using traditional ethnic musical elements, others are in Western metrical, strophic hymn style. This congregation also sings Praise and Worship songs. Not surprisingly, Western hymns translated into the vernacular remain an important part of the congregation’s repertoire. Adding to the mix, this congregation also sings the “Kyrie Eleison” from the Eastern Orthodox tradition and songs from the Taiz e community. In keeping with the missionary’s teaching, liturgical texts, such as the votum, the assurance of pardon, and the blessing, are mostly taken from the Bible. Newly composed prayers (written and extempor e) reflect the people’s daily experiences. This article explains how churches in Indonesia have shaped their liturgy in the postcolonial era through a hybrid approach or, in the Indonesian cooking metaphor, it can be called “Gadogado.” We base this article on our experiences as planners, leaders, teachers, and scholars of liturgy in Indonesia.","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41729770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2022.2026173
T. Johnson
{"title":"Unmute Yourself: Revealing Rituals","authors":"T. Johnson","doi":"10.1080/0458063x.2022.2026173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063x.2022.2026173","url":null,"abstract":"I learned early in my education how cultural practices convey the truths or values of the culture in which those practices take place. It was during my undergraduate studies that I was exposed to the study and analysis of rituals surrounding death and how they, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, present and promote the values and beliefs of those practicing them. An example of this approach was Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death. It was in Mitford’s work that I first encountered the practice of being buried in one’s car. Such a practice directly demonstrates the importance of that car (or even cars in general) to the deceased. Indirectly it demonstrates the financial status of the deceased and/or the family to be able to afford such an ostentatious display of wealth in already expensive funerary rites. This practice raised the question: do funeral rites demonstrate social and economic stratification? This theory was put to an empirical test through a study of Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, in an upper-level sociology course I took later. Graceland Cemetery was established in 1860 by a prominent Chicago lawyer, in what was then the town of Lake View—now in the neighborhood just north of Wrigley Field on Chicago’s northside. The cemetery’s board was quickly filled with dignitaries from all aspects of Chicago’s life, including architects. Designed as an homage to Victorian gardens, it likewise attracted significant customers. So, on the one hand, the evidence of such a “high end” cemetery gives some initial evidence to one’s burial indicating your social status. Yet the more interesting story is actually within the walls of Graceland. Graceland attracted some of the most important figures in all of Chicago’s history. Our class project asked the question of whether there were well-defined “neighborhoods” and if so, how were they defined? What we discovered was that there were distinct neighborhoods for Graceland’s “residents” and even stratification within the neighborhoods. For example, the most “desirable” neighborhood is located at the far north end of Graceland. Here one finds etched in stone names like McCormick, Palmer, Field, Getty, Goodman, and Burnham—significant names in Chicago and beyond. Many of these burial sites are large plots of land with large “improvements” inhabiting them. For example, the tomb created for Carrie Eliza Getty by her husband was created by the renowned architect, Louis Sullivan. Not only is it large, but it is also considered to be one of Sullivan’s finest works. Not to be outdone, Daniel Burnham, the designer of the post-fire Chicago city plan, is buried on an island in the middle of a large pond. However, there are less ostentatious graves, such as that of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who resided in that neighborhood, and had a very elegant, though understated, marker. Likewise, some, like brew master Peter Schoenhofen, who resides outside this more desirable neighborhood, are buried ","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48037452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026178
M. E. Cornou
{"title":"Liturgical Inculturation and Popular Protestantism in Argentina: The Musicking and Rituals of the Evangelistic Crusades of Carlos Annacondia","authors":"M. E. Cornou","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026178","url":null,"abstract":"music, the singing, and the traffic jam caused by the steady stream of vehicles and people approaching the site work together to build great expectancy among the enormous crowd. The informality of the meeting and the freedom to move, since most of the people were standing, help the hours to pass without anyone feeling too tired. 15","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44298094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026697
Mikie Roberts
{"title":"Toward a Distinct Identity: The Caribbean Moravian Praise Liturgy Book","authors":"Mikie Roberts","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026697","url":null,"abstract":"Agency, according to Kath Woodward, is one of the five key components central to understanding how identity is formed. The other four main elements are structures, same, difference, and symbols/representation. Structures are the forces beyond our control that shape identity. Sameness underscores how one can use similarity as a marker to form identity. Difference acknowledges the characteristics that make us dissimilar from others as a pointer in identity formation. Symbols or representations highlight agreement on a specific tangible object that encapsulates the elements of the identity being espoused. Agency underscores just how much control one applies in determining one’s identity. Though these factors which Woodward itemizes intersect, making it difficult to demarcate the role of each in identity formation, I have decided to highlight agency in this paper and to propose that the 2017 publication of the Caribbean Moravian Praise Liturgy Book be seen as an expression of liturgical agency. This Liturgy Book accompanied the new hymnal, Caribbean Moravian Praise (henceforth known as the CMP), which was adopted as the official hymnal by the two Unity Provinces of the Moravian Church in the Caribbean: the Province of the Eastern West Indies and the Province of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. In another published article, I highlighted the editorial process which informed the compilation of the hymnal, making the case that it reflects the goal to offer a worship resource that would ensure “balanced singing.” In this article, I draw attention to the Liturgy Book and its content, highlighting mainly the new litanies which were included in the volume. By examining the content of these new litanies, I contend that the liturgical vocabulary of the faithful, in the Caribbean Moravian context, has been expanded to their benefit. Agency, then, is expressed through the use of the English language within the framework of corporate worship. To be more precise, I am defining liturgical agency here as the coordinated and intentional exercise of the will of a group of people to create a common liturgical resource. In this process, the liturgical agency is most evident in that the content has been determined by their own criteria which are primarily, though not exclusively, informed by the local context. In the process of identity formation, agency, by its very definition, cannot simply be theorized. It must be actualized. Within the pages of the Liturgy Book, therefore, one finds agency manifested both in theory and in practice. The theory is captured in the language of the prayers in the new litanies while agency manifests in practice when the prayers are read and heard for worship.","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44344495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026177
Karen Campbell
{"title":"Movements toward Multicultural Worship during a Pandemic","authors":"Karen Campbell","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026177","url":null,"abstract":"There can be no doubt that the 2020 global pandemic excavated many rudimentary principles. It highlighted humanity’s global interconnectedness and interdependence both biologically, scientifically, and economically. Yet, it also exposed the cruel underbelly of global systems that protected dominant voices at the expense of the vulnerable. In theory, the communities best placed to handle the pandemic with agility were diaspora communities that already operated within glocal yet also borderless, multicultural, transnational, and multidirectional territories. The church as the body of Christ should have the capacity to do the same. Yet without self-critical vigilance, congregations that function within the name of multiculturalism can also fall prey to a dynamic where dominant voices temper and constrain minority voices. How then can a worshiping community, romanced by the notion of hybridity, sustain true, equitable multicultural worship in a way that is not valorized or endorsed by hierarchy in such times as these? This paper describes two urban multicultural worshiping communities from a postcolonial perspective. One is Church of the Servant, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the Christian Reformed Church of North America. The second is Galway United Methodist and Presbyterian Church in Ireland. These congregations are both reformed, liturgical, urban, and have similar sympathies toward asylum seekers, refugees, and migrant workers. This description will consider worship transitions negotiated in response to the social restrictions enforced through the pandemic and how they celebrated the subaltern wisdom, creativity, and even resistance to dominant supposed “norms” in the worship space. A helpful tool for analyzing the drift toward multicultural worship is Ian Collinge’s “Moving from monocultural to multicultural worship” which identifies five positions toward multiculturalism: inherited, independent, inclusive, integrated, and innovative fusion. In inherited, there is unity without diversity. Independent groups have diversity without unity––the church is separated into ethno-linguistic congregations. Inclusive music is where there is unity with invited diversity: different groups are invited to sing songs in their own style. Integrated music is unity with blended diversity where cultures attempt to learn each other’s songs. The final position is of innovative fusion where church musicians learn new music together, exercising a blended approach to culturally conscious worship. This paper will attempt to locate each congregation on Collinge’s spectrum before and then during the pandemic to identify shifts that have taken place. Sites of contrapuntality will also be identified according to Edward Said’s use of the term which uncovers juxtapositions that reveal colonial implications.","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44603414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026175
L. Ruth
{"title":"The Hidden Diaspora of Mainline and Evangelical Adoption of Contemporary Worship","authors":"L. Ruth","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2026175","url":null,"abstract":"By the early 1990s Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, Illinois, was perhaps the most prominent church in the United States. It was the hot ecclesiastical news of the day. Articles about the church appeared in publications across a range of readerships: Woman’s Day, US Catholic, the New York Times, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and Christianity Today. Sociologists of religion, too, were writing their dissertations on this rapidly growing church. Even the bulwark of serious scholarship on liturgical matters, the North American Academy of Liturgy, took a field trip to one of this congregation’s services in the 1990s when the Academy had its annual meeting in Chicago. In addition, increasing numbers of church leadership teams took their own pilgrimages to Illinois to see, appropriate, and imitate in hope of replicating Willow Creek’s success. What was it about Willow Creek that garnered the attention? It was the church’s seeker services on Saturday and Sunday. In order to provide an accessible, enjoyable experience for its suburban target audience, which the church called “Unchurched Harry and Mary,” Willow Creek had turned the church world upside down as it sought to remove every boring barrier that might have led these suburbanites to avoid other churches. The result was a thorough revisioning of Sunday morning. Relevant messages? Professional-grade popular music? Quality dramas? Outstanding hospitality (which reached even to thinking through the dynamics of parking)? Relaxed atmosphere? Attractive, business-style campus? Willow Creek had thought through all of these issues as it planned and led its multiple seeker services every weekend. This seeker-driven approach taught by Willow Creek offered a model for revolutionizing thousands of congregations. What was not nearly as prominent, capturing neither the headlines of the press nor the attention of the eager-to-imitate pilgrims who sojourned to Illinois, was that Willow Creek was undergoing its own liturgical migration. But this move was not happening on the weekends. It was in the congregation’s midweek worship services. These midweek services were the ones planned and held for the active Christian believers in the congregation. (At the time, Willow Creek carefully avoided calling its weekend services for seekers “worship.” They were for evangelism and outreach, not the worship of God. Its worship services—the “New Community” services—occurred mid-week.) Initially these midweek services were a bit of an afterthought since the driving vision for the congregation’s start in the late 1970s was evangelistic outreach. These mid-week services were along the line of a Bible Study with a few contemporary songs topically selected and placed in a nice order. But that status changed after the summer of 1982 when the congregation’s lead pastor, Bill Hybels, returned from a summer break having attended a small, charismatic Black church in","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41422685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990663
Brandy Daniels
{"title":"Practicing Martyrdom? From Liturgy as Protest to Protest as Liturgy","authors":"Brandy Daniels","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990663","url":null,"abstract":"“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” I exclaim, all of my muscles and senses relaxing back to their state of mild hypervigilance. “I’m pretty new to town, so I’m still getting used to all of this,” I explain, gesturing all around me.” My internal monologue is working to calm me down and berate me at the same time—wtf, body? It’s not like the cops are going to calmly tap you on the shoulder. The feds sure as hell won’t. I take a breath. “What’s up?”","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43701223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.2001288
D. Turnbloom
{"title":"An Eaten Church: Celebrating the Eucharist as Fragments of Bread","authors":"D. Turnbloom","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2021.2001288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.2001288","url":null,"abstract":"In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas describes Sacraments as signs that lead us to believe in the sources of our salvation. The many signs we embody in our liturgical celebrations serve the purpose of deepening our experiential knowledge of God’s love for us. In this essay, I will examine one of the Christian tradition’s most important sacramental signs: bread. More specifically, I will focus on the sacramental significance of broken bread (i.e., klasma). Although an exhaustive study of the way in which broken bread has served Christianity throughout its history is certainly beyond the scope of a single essay, in the present work, I will seek to understand how this particular sacramental sign can be a source for contemporary ecclesiology. By examining the nature of broken bread, insofar as it is used eucharistically as a sign of Christ’s Church, we can come to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the Church and the world for which it exists and from which it exists. The bread that we break during eucharistic celebrations is, to use St. Augustine’s language, a visible word through which God tells us who we are and who we are called to be. The nature of broken bread, especially as it is portrayed in the Gospel accounts of the miraculous feeding of the multitudes, can teach us something about the nature of the Church. By focusing my attention on these Gospel accounts, I will be constructing (1) an ecclesiology of an eaten Church and (2) from that ecclesiology, a theology of ministry. Ultimately, I am concerned with emphasizing the missionary nature of the Church and its presence in a pluralistic world.","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41759584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990665
Marcelitte Failla
{"title":"Black Tarot: African American Women and Divine Processes of Resilience","authors":"Marcelitte Failla","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990665","url":null,"abstract":"After our meeting in an online occult Facebook group, Amanda decided to come by my house to receive a tarot reading. Immediately, upon her entrance to my living room, we began getting to know one another. I introduced her to my six-month-old puppy and offered her coffee. I unwrapped my tarot cards from the gold and brown cloth where they are kept safe and asked Amanda to shuffle them while telling me what was on her mind. We spoke like old friends, sharing the deepest parts of ourselves. Amanda’s body language told me she was sad. Her shoulders hunched. Eyes cast down. She was struggling with depression. The medication that she was previously using was not working and she was scared to begin a new prescription, not knowing its effects. She was finishing college and beginning a path advocating for reproductive justice. Her goal: to become a doula and help other Black women receive quality care during childbirth. Turning to tarot, Amanda asked, “Will it work? Will I overcome this?” In America, “Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.” Helping Amanda through this reading felt important, not just for me, but for us all. This article explores African American women’s shifting tarot from a European-dominated tradition into one that cultivates resilience for Black people. Through a process of creolization, or “Hoodoo sensibility” as one of my respondents termed it, Black women make tarot Black by reimagining the Eurocentric deck into one that reflects brown and Black faces and connecting to ancestors long lost through the transatlantic slave trade. I argue that due to the reinterpretation of tarot within an Africana religious framework—what I’ve termed Black tarot—cultivates moments of resilience for Black women practitioners as a temporary experience of perseverance instead of a static state of being. As such, Black tarot acts as a resource for Black women cultivating this processual resilience by revealing the potentialities surrounding a situation, connecting the querent to her ancestors, and providing suggestions for possible courses of action. Additionally, many of my respondents—like Amanda, above—are actively engaged in social justice work. As such, Black tarot not only impacts individual decisions but has the possibility to transform wider networks through community-based action. I have been reading tarot almost all my life. My mother gave me my first tarot deck when I was twelve years old. She taught me about the suits, the major and minor arcana, and the","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42896247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990664
Rachel Wheeler
{"title":"The Expansive Table: Food as Formative and Transformative","authors":"Rachel Wheeler","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990664","url":null,"abstract":"Liturgical celebrations in Christian communities often feature a meal of thanksgiving: the Eucharist. This meal commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus and his friends (Luke 22:14–20) and invites members of the faith community into a life of shared ministry. That this happens through the sharing of food is significant because food is an essential feature of our lives—food forms and transforms us. That personal and communal formation and transformation are effected through such a ubiquitous agent in our lives as food can, however, become problematic when food’s very ubiquity renders it dismissed from serious consideration. Indeed, in my own North American context where for many people food is easily procured, food can just as easily be taken for granted. To retrieve a sense of gratitude for—and celebration of—our everyday meals and the vital role they play in our lives requires that we be intentional about our relationship with food. This essay explores the farm-to-table (or farm-to-fork) movement and related food procurement principles and practices as means of restoring relationships—of forming and transforming ourselves as beings in relationship. I suggest that reconfiguration of the ways we procure food might be understood as transformative praxis. Reconfiguration may even become transformative liturgical praxis when we evoke the image of an expansive table that extends the sacred (associated with our liturgical meals) to the meals we regularly eat alone or with others in household settings. The term expansive table also means to connect our activities of providing foods at our household tables with the task of making sure everyone has room at the table, including access to food cared for or grown and procured within just conditions. The farm-to-table movement aims to render transparent the process of growing and making food and to draw producers and consumers into closer relationship. This movement invites people of faith to attend to the impacts their food choices have, expansively, on tables beyond their own and to redress the dis-connecting that thoughtless consumption effects. In this essay, I begin with a statement of the problem of contemporary experiences of alienation, recognizing that my context is one in which food is typically plentiful and more easily procured than elsewhere in the world. Many consumers sharing this context nevertheless experience alienation from the foods they consume and from Earth that provides the food. I then suggest a renewal of our relationship with food through engaging food production and procurement practices, food preparation and consumption practices, and finally food disposal practices. Through these movements I patch together reflections by people of faith for whom food procurement and preparation activities have become, in a vital sense, transformative liturgical praxis because these activities function to restore relationships of intimacy with one’s own embodied self, other members of Earth’s communi","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42346989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}