Mystagogy of the Unauthorized

Liturgical studies are not easily defined. It is a field that avails itself of many disciplines (e.g., theology, history, ritual studies, sociology, etc.) and many methodologies (e.g., ethnography, archaeology, critical theories, etc.). As such, the future of liturgical studies will unfold on many frontiers. The goal of this essay is to focus on one frontier that could benefit from renewed attention: teaching liturgical studies to undergraduate students. If the field of liturgical studies is going to continue to grow and evolve the way it has over the last fifty years, then I believe the undergraduate classroom must preoccupy us as much as the seminary classroom or the doctoral seminar. As seminaries close and humanities departments are steadily reduced to groups of instructors whose primary role is teaching introductory courses in a core curriculum, it will be beneficial to see this moment of crisis as an opportunity for exploring different ways of teaching. Too often, undergraduate education relies on what Paolo Freire called “the ‘banking’ concept of education.” Students are presented with curated information which they are expected to understand and memorize. The good students are the ones who are quick to comprehend the information, but the best students are the ones who also show fascination and appreciation for what the instructor has offered them. To borrow the terminology of post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the best students are the ones who most readily transform into the type of reader that is implied by the texts that have been chosen by the instructor. “In the [literature classroom] the goal is at least to shape the mind of the student so that it can resemble the mind of the so-called implied reader of the literary text, even when that is a historically distanced cultural fiction.” In the liturgical studies classroom, this curated information often consists of liturgical rituals and rubrics, the history of their development, and commentary on the meaning of those liturgies provided by authoritative (often clerical) voices. According to Spivak, this form of pedagogy serves as a technology of colonization. The students’ success depends on their ability to become like their instructors, learning to love the authorized content of the course. In Freire’s words: