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Notes
1 This essay is a close adaptation of a previously unpublished lecture I gave in March 2020 via videoconference at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Late in the following year (2021), Lisa Allen published an important volume on a womanist theology of worship, which is not engaged in this work due to it emerging well after this lecture was given. Allen’s work is of significant note, and she much more fully examines the centering of the pursuit of justice in worship within womanist thought. Lisa Allen, A Womanist Theology of Worship: Liturgy, Justice, and Communal Righteousness (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2021).
2 Delores Williams, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices,” in Religion Online, https://www.religion-online.org/article/womanist-theology-black-womens-voices/.
3 Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.
4 Leah Schade, Creation-Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology, and the Pulpit (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2015), 65.
5 Chanequa Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Press, 2019), 208.
6 Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices, 208.
7 Dwight Hopkins and Linda Thomas, “Voices from the Margins in the United States,” in The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview, ed. Gregory Baum (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999), 209–10.
8 See Marjorie Procter-Smith’s feminist perspective In Her Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition (Akron, OH: OSL Publications, 2000); Justo and Catherine González’s Latinx perspective, The Liberating Pulpit (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994); Leah Schade’s eco-feminist perspective, Creation-Crisis Preaching (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2015); Mary Collins’s feminist perspective, “Principles of Feminist Liturgy,” in Women at Worship: Interpretations of North American Diversity, ed. Marjorie Procter-Smith and Janet Walton (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 9–28; James H. Harris’s black perspective, Preaching Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995); Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz’s mujerista perspective, “On the Birthing Stool: Mujerista Liturgy,” also in Women at Worship: Interpretations of North American Diversity, ed. Marjorie Procter-Smith and Janet Walton (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 191–212.
9 The original phrase is “legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi.” Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, Article 48, November 20, 1947, http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20111947_mediator-dei.html.
10 Nathan Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2007), 12.
11 This was published alongside Don E. Saliers’ essay, “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7, no. 4 (1979), reprinted in Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God—Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers, ed. E. Byron Anderson and Bruce Morrill (Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press, 1998), 15–35. See Paul Ramsey, “Liturgy and Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7, no. 2 (1979): 139.
12 Teresa Berger, “Lex orandi—lex credenda—lex agendi: Auf dem Weg zu einer ökumenisch konsensfähigen Verhältnisbestimmung von Liturgie, Theologie, und Ethik,” Archiv fur Liturgiewissenschaft 27 (1985): 425–32.
13 Klaus-Peter Jörns, “Lex orandi—lex credenda—lex convivendi. Paradigma für Kirche und Theologie,” in Der Lebensbezug des Gottesdienstes. Studien zu seinem kirchlichen und kulturellen Kontext, ed. Klaus-Peter Jörns (München: Kaiser Verlag,1988), 12–22.
14 Kevin Irwin distinguishes lex vivendi from lex agendi by arguing that the rule of living is living as related to the liturgy. See Kevin Irwin, Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press, 1994), 55.
15 There are numerous examples of violence within liturgy. A classic critique of patriarchal violence in liturgy can be found in (and cited above) Marjorie Procter-Smith, Praying with Our Eyes Open: Engendering Feminist Liturgical Prayer (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995). An overview of the relationship between anti-black racial violence and Euro-American liturgy can be found in Scott Haldeman, Toward Liturgies that Reconcile: Race and Ritual among African-American and European-American Protestants (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2007). For a broader pastoral overview see Elaine Ramshaw, “Making (Ritual) Sense of Our Own Lives” in Injustice and the Care of Souls: Taking Oppression Seriously in Pastoral Care, ed. Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook and Karen Montagno (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 291–304. For a homiletical perspective on Euro-centric, white supremacist violence in preaching see Lis Valle-Ruiz and Andrew Wymer, eds., Unmasking White Preaching: Racial Hegemony, Resistance, and Possibilities in Homiletics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022).
16 HyeRan Kim-Cragg, “Postcolonial Practices on Eucharist,” in Postcolonial Practice of Ministry: Leadership, Liturgy, and Interfaith Engagement, ed. Pui-Lan Kwok and Stephen Burns (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 77–89.
17 Cláudio Carvalhaes, “Liturgy and Postcolonialism: An Introduction,” in Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspective: Only One Is Holy, ed. Cláudio Carvalhaes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5.
18 Carvalhaes, “Liturgy and Postcolonialism,” 9.
19 Here I am reminded of Susan Ross’s critique in Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (New York: Crossroad, 2001).
20 Khalia Williams, “Love Your Flesh: The Power and Protest of Embodied Worship,” Liturgy 35, no. 1 (2020): 3–9.
21 I link this to what can be called “subjugated liturgies” along the lines of Michel Foucault’s “subjugated knowledge.” These are practices of worship and preaching, generally arising from non-dominant bodies, that in Foucauldian terms do not meet a standard necessary for categorization as “liturgy” or “liturgical knowledge” by the dominant keepers of knowledge. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
22 I am influenced by Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted (New York: Crown Publishing, 2007).
23 I am reminded here of David Powers’s use of “language event” to allow for the complex and multiple ways in which meaning can be made in a ritual. See David Power, Sacrament: The Language of God’s Giving (New York: Herder and Herder, 1999), 65.
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Andrew Wymer
Andrew Wymer is associate professor of preaching and worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, IL. His publications include Unmasking White Preaching: Racial Hegemony, Resistance, and Possibilities in Homiletics (co-edited with Lis Valle-Ruiz; Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022) and Worship and Power: Liturgical Authority in Free Church Traditions (co-edited with Sarah Kathleen Johnson; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023).