Liturgy with a Difference

Christian churches in recent decades have taken some steps in their practices of liturgy and worship toward acknowledging the graced dignity of human variety. But who is still excluded? What pernicious norms still govern below the surface, and how might they be revealed? How do texts, gestures, and space abet and enforce such norms? How might Christian assemblies gather multiple expressions of human difference to propose through Christian liturgy patterns of graced interaction in the world around them?

Liturgy with a Difference gathers a broad range of international theologians and scholars to interrogate current practices of liturgy and worship in order to unmask ways in which dehumanizing majoritarianisms and presumed norms of gender, culture, ethnicity, and body, among others, remain at work in congregations.

Together, the chapters in this collection call for a liturgical practice that recognizes and rehearses the vivid richness of God's image found in the human community and glimpsed, if only for a moment, in liturgical celebration. They point a way beyond mere inclusion toward a generous embrace of the many differences that make up the Christian community.

Chapters include All Things to All?: Requeering Stuart's Eucharistic Erasure of Priestly Sex (Susannah Cornwall, Exeter University, UK) Between Erasure and Palimpsest: Gestures Towards a Queered Liturgical Assembly (Rachel Mann, Anglican Priest, poet and writer) Liturgy, Diaspora, and a `Majority of Minorities': Reflections of a Migratory Liturgical Magpie (Kristine Suna-Koro, Xavier University, USA) Preaching in an Age of Centrifugal Believing: Facing Polydoxy without Betraying Orthodoxy (Edward Foley, Catholic Theological Union, USA) "All Are Welcome?": A Sermon (Teresa Berger, Yale Divinity School, USA)