![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 When I described this initial experience to a friend and colleague, wondering if I was completely misreading things, she replied with this expression, which has been part of Australian consciousness for some time. See A.A. Philips, “The Cultural Cringe,” Meanjin Quarterly (Summer 1950), https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-cultural-cringe-by-a-a-phillips/.
2 I give an account of my participant-observation among Anglican congregations in the Diocese of Melbourne in my “Field Notes from a Pilgrimage: Lessons from Beneath the Southern Cross for a Pilgrim from the Lands of the North Star,” Australian Journal of Liturgy 15, no. 4 (2017): 240–53.
3 The New English Hymnal (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1986).
4 For an overview of the progressive fracturing of Australian Anglicanism, including the question of the role of women, see Muriel Porter, The New Puritans: The Rise of Fundamentalism in the Anglican Church (Carlton: Melbourne University Press), esp. 87–116.
5 A Prayer Book for Australia (Mulgrave: Broughton Books, 1999).
6 See APBA, 34–40.
7 Uniting in Worship 2 (Sydney: Uniting Church Press, 2005).
8 I apply my experiences in Australia to my US context in “Diary of Pilgrimage: An American Pilgrim Under the Southern Cross,” Worship 92, no. 3 (2018), 396–414.
9 On liturgical developments in the Episcopal Church, see my “The 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church and the Liturgy: New Wine in Old Wineskins?” Anglican Theological Review 98, no. 4 (Fall, 2016): 681–701; and, with Stephen Burns, “A Prayer Book for the Twenty-first Century?” Anglican Theological Review 96, no. 4 (Fall, 2014): 639–60.
10 Stephen Burns has recently highlighted more contemporary manifestations of praying “from here” in his “A Postcard from Narrm,” Liturgy 38, no. 1 (2023), 11–17, DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2154512.
11 Among these is Christian Worship in Australia: Inculturating the Liturgical Tradition, eds. Stephen Burns and Anita Monro (Strathfield: St Pauls, 2009), along with Uniting in Worship 2, which notably includes a collection of the Lord’s Prayer in “languages other than English” (334–44), as well as “Acknowledgement of the First People of the Land” (239), and the second great prayer of thanksgiving (316–20).
12 For example, the proper eucharistic preface for Australia (APBA, 161) and the prayer for Australia Day (APBA, 204).
13 See, for example, Teresa Berger Gender Differences in the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting the Veil on Liturgy’s Past (London: Ashgate, 2011), 33.
14 I have suggested some strategies for accomplishing this in “God’s Farm and Field: An Ecology of the Liturgical Assembly,” in Fully Conscious, Fully Active: Essays in Honor of Gabe Huck, eds. Bryan Cones and Stephen Burns (Chicago, IL: Liturgy Training Publications, 2021), 31-41.
15 The Episcopal Church, for example, has officially repudiated the “doctrine of discovery,” which gave doctrinal cover to European invaders in the sixteenth century. See, for example, then-Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori, “Pastoral Letter on the Doctrine of Discovery and Indigenous Peoples,” May 16, 2021, https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/episcopal-presiding-bishop-katharine-jefferts-schori-issues-pastoral-letter-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-indigenous-peoples/.
16 Sharon Fennema explores “whiteness” as a cultural reality in U.S. context, along with the ways it affects Christian worship. See her “Postcolonial Whiteness: Being-With in Worship,” in Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy, ed. Cláudio Carvalhaes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 277–79. Ruth Duck has explored some of the liturgical heritage of “White Protestant worship” in Worship for the Whole People of God: Vital Worship for the 21st Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 47–51. From a British perspective, see Jenny Daggers, “Why Misunderstanding Matters: Whiteness Made Visible to White Eyes,” in Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures, eds. Rebekah Pryor and Stephen Burns (Lanham, MD: Lexington Fortress Press, 2023), 89–98.
17 The fact that “race” and “racism” exist and function differently in different places should be obvious enough, but the sheer weight of US cultural and academic production casts a long shadow. Others are troubling US-centric accounts. See, for example, essays in Transgressing Race: Readings, Theologies, Belongings, eds. Jione Havea and Y. T. Vinayaraj (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2023).
18 For a summary of the policy and its history, see National Museum of Australia, “White Australia policy,” https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-australia-policy.
19 Dorothy McRae-McMahon provides a helpful summary of Australia’s history of migrations as it relates to liturgy in “Liturgy in the Southern Hemisphere: The Australian Context,” in Christian Worship in Australia, 29–38.
20 Daggers, “Why Misunderstanding Matters,” 91.
21 See Anglican Eucharistic Liturgies: 1985–2010—The Authorized Liturgies of the Anglican Communion, ed. Colin Buchanan (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2011), 221–4. The Burmese service of Holy Communion varies somewhat from APBA and includes a Eucharistic prayer that directly addresses the second person of the Trinity.
22 Juan Oliver, “Just Praise: Prayer Book Revision and Hispanic/Latino Anglicanism,” in A Prayer Book for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Ruth A. Meyers (New York: Church Publishing, 1996), 256–87. Oliver notes that “truly multicultural liturgies . . . would be those in which Anglo leadership and numbers are one segment among others, not an umbrella encompassing others” (266).
23 See Burns, “Postcard,” 12.
24 “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander [ASTI] people are ‘proportionally … the most incarcerated people on the planet’ and remain ‘the poorest, sickest, and in every way most disadvantaged members of contemporary Australian society.’” Burns, “Postcard,” 11, quoting Garry Deverell, Gondwana Theology: A Trawloolway Man Reflects on Christian Faith (Melbourne: Morning Star, 2018), 21.
25 Burns, “Postcard,” 15.
26 Obergefell v. Hodges, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf.
27 A summary of the results can be found at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1800.0.
28 I have written about my experiences in Dignity/Chicago in Bryan Cones, This Assembly of Believers: The Gifts of Difference in the Church at Prayer (London: SCM Press, 2020), esp. 70–72 and 162–96.
29 See Cones, This Assembly of Believers, 182–89.
30 For the development in marriage practice in the Uniting Church in Australia, see Peter Grayson-Weeks, “From Equality in Marriage to Marriage Equality,” Australian Journal of Liturgy 18 (October 2022): 104–12.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bryan Cones
Bryan Cones is a presbyter in the Episcopal Church, Diocese of Chicago, USA, an honorary post-doctoral researcher at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia, and editor of the Australian Journal of Liturgy. His publications include Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Christian Assembly (co-edited with Stephen Burns; London: SCM Press, 2019); This Assembly of Believers: The Gifts of Difference in the Church at Prayer (London: SCM Press, 2020), and Queering Christian Worship: Reconstructing Liturgical Theology (edited; New York: Seabury Press, 2023).