Select versions of the US are constantly projected around much of the world in popular media. Some of this has to do with Hollywood, postcodes like 90210,Footnote1 the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and his neighbors, with evident appeal to some people’s aspirations of privilege, wealth, and swank. If not a thin strip of California then maybe a suite of little kingdoms: Disney World, Dollywood, Graceland, Neverland, more or less bizarre. If at least some of this is the stuff of some people’s dreams, much of what presents in news about “America” in other parts of the world is more like a nightmare: incomprehensible daily deadly gun violence; massive gaps and brutal lacks in basic health-care; vehement pro-Lifers in states with the death penalty; impeachment amidst endless suspicion of power, corruption and lies in high office; the building of walls and the strong arm of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement); and the constant lurking and lashing out of the monster of racism.Footnote2
A large country with a massive populace and so much trouble must make for very difficult contexts for many people in the US to find time or energy to focus attention beyond their own problems, hopes, and dreams. Of course, Hollywood has a way of placing actors with “American” accents in all kinds of world events in which “Americans” may or may not have been present or acting as they do in the movies.
People living within American culture who are in the US find different ways to survive and thrive within it, and without doubt some interpret it with great sophistication (not least around vexed constructs of “race”) even as others might be profoundly unconscious of how pervasive can be the norms of their culture as part of everyday life, carried around in social and other media, in exports and commerce of all kinds.
This issue of Liturgy, however, invites the extension of imagination to how people might live with and within American culture from outside the US, as they inevitably also contend with that culture thanks to Hollywood and many products. That is, whether or not people have US citizenship, and live on US soil, lots of people are encountering, engaging with, presence, absence, marks, or shadows, of “America.”Footnote3 Think of things as apparently innocuous as telephone country codes: the US is #001, and for example Australia follows at #061. Think of web addresses, in which the US tends to be invisible in suffixes, with no further appellation: so the US is .edu, and for example Australia is .edu.au. Consider journal titles: the one in front of you is just Liturgy, whereas for example an Australian counterpart names its context as Australian Journal of Liturgy. Even the term “American” requires significant troubling. How did one country out of the thirty-five internationally recognized nation states and possibly thousands of sovereign, indigenous tribal nations represented in North and South America become the “American” nation? Hence the reader will notice that authors in this issue sometimes use the awkward term “US-ian” as an intentional alternative. It denotes those who live in the US and are to varying degrees assimilated within domestic culture and affairs, while inviting recognition that people beyond the US claim identity as American, in other countries on the continent.Footnote4
Presuming this sketch has at least a grain of truth, we might wonder more about if and how related dynamics are mirrored in the production of liturgical theology and by liturgical practice in the US. We wonder: which parts of “America” get into the books—books of both “primary” and “secondary” kinds of theology: the ritual books, the scholarly books? We wonder: whose “America” makes it to movie screens, or tourist guides, or liturgy resources, and travels far and wide? And whose cultural expressions do not reap the same level of attention? Beyond sites that get so much limelight—think: Sunset Strip, Las Vegas at night, Silicon Valley, Arlington Cemetery, Central Park, or the Ivy League—whose “America” is harder to see, both at home and abroad? What about Bear River, Wounded Knee, and even Charleston and Selma, just to name a few? We are curious: who comes to visit, though is not at home but on holiday in US-ian liturgical theology and practice? Who may even get stuck in or imprisoned by it? Where are the gaps and inequalities, hazards and harms, of US society in the products of American liturgical theology, written and enacted, intentionally and otherwise?Footnote5 And—very importantly—how might US culture, refracted in US-ian liturgical theology, practice, and in other ways, not only overshadow but positively, helpfully, throw light and into relief intractable problems, still skulking empires, or horrors and sorrows in other cultures?
To employ language common to intentional ecumenism, what could come from an “exchange of gifts” around such questions? What might be the boons of mutual receptivity to others’ perspectives? For example, and with obvious relevance to liturgical celebration, church-going endures in many parts of the US, yet a more detailed picture of shifting demographics raises concerns about what patterns will emerge. What might US-ians look to anticipate, expect to have to flex around, and seek to learn from Christians in other cultures in which church-going numbers have drastically collapsed in the particular confluence of secularization and pluralization in their places? And might those others know some things about what may be coming the US’s way? The basic contention of this issue of Liturgy is that because the US is so dominant in at least English-language liturgical production, it could be good to pursue questions across cultures, around borders, over oceans—even as pursuit of gifts in tow might mean a bit of stumbling around sometimes. It seems we are not very used to such conversation.Footnote6
We are also profoundly aware that this issue represents only the start of a more organized conversation about US-ian influence in liturgical theology and practice. Though the voices here represent as diverse a range of perspectives as we could muster in the time we had to put this issue together, this issue also contains silences brought about by the human limitations of our own awareness, the exclusive nature of scholarly discourse in English, and the limited reach of our relationships. We proceed in awareness of how many relationships are yet to be formed and voices yet to be heard, and we hope that this issue represents an invitation to further conversation. In this vein, we have taken practical steps as editors to create a tangibly hospitable environment. You will find a variety of cultural references, figures of speech, syntax, terminology, spellings, and writing conventions that reflect the array of geographical and social locations from which participants in this issue hail. We encourage you to enjoy these as invitations to listen more closely and to encounter other lenses through which to interpret worship, preaching, learning, and liturgical studies.
Introducing the articles
Gerard Moore undertook his doctoral studies at Catholic University of America in Washington DC, USA, before returning to Australia where he lives in Sydney. As in some of his other writing, here Moore carefully reflects on distinctive aspects of Australian culture as these pertain to liturgy, and he especially explores difference between American and his particular “Antipodian” location.Footnote7
Jaewoong Jung, who went for his doctoral studies to Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, USA, then invites a postcolonial slant on how the US has impacted liturgical developments in his own Korea, to which he returned.
Lis Valle-Ruiz’s work examines how Presbyterian missionary work in Puerto Rico exerted colonial influence on worship practices and how this was met with liturgical resistance. Providing a detailed historical case study of the influence of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Valle-Ruiz—who holds a doctorate from Vanderbilt Divinity School—reflects on decolonial futures for worship that may invite all readers on carefully nurturing more decolonial worship spaces.
Gennifer Benjamin Brooks provides a glimpse into the complex interaction of Trinidadian worship with US-ian influences amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Brooks, who grew up in Trinidad and continues to nurture personal and professional relationships there, holds a PhD in liturgical studies from Drew University Theological School. In this essay she utilizes a conversational approach with Trinidadian ministers to trace the complicated colonial legacies that underlie US-ian influence in Trinidad and the ways in which that impact is marked by ambiguity.
In contrast to others contributing to this issue, Bryan Cones (the editor of Australian Journal of Liturgy) moved away from the US for doctoral study. He writes here in “Cultural Exchanges” about his particular “pilgrimage” from the perspective of a US-ian abroad who moved from Chicago to the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia, to earn his PhD.
Stephen Burns did his doctoral work at Durham University in England, his homeland, before migrating to Australia. He has also spent a short time in the US. His article explores twenty or so years of output of this journal, looking for how the US seems to present in it, asking also about the rest of the world.
Finally, Andrew Wymer, a US-ian who has spent time over the northern border in Canada and who gained his doctorate at the institution in which he now teaches, Garrett Evangelical, provides a wider frame for the kind of explorations others undertake in this issue. Wymer insists on the importance of the “law of justice,” a principle that must consciously keep being brought to liturgical work.Footnote8
In various ways, then, this issue proceeds in the spirit of famed Scot Robert Burns’ well-known lines in “To a louse,” written late in the eighteenth-century. The poet is in church and spots a parasite on a fancy lady’s hat, commenting:
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!Footnote9
Welcome to the conversation; come join this shared quest for wisdom.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen Burns
Stephen Burns is professor of liturgical and practical theology, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. His publications include Conversations about Divine Mystery: Essays in Honor of Gail Ramshaw (co-edited with HyeRan Kim-Cragg; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023); Explorations in Twentieth Century Theology and Philosophy: People Preoccupied with God (Ann Loades, ed. Stephen Burns; London: Anthem Press, 2023); Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures (co-edited with Rebekah Pryor; Lanham: Fortress Academic, 2023) and From the Shores of Silence: Conversations in Practical Feminist Theology (co-edited with Ash Cocksworth and Rachel Starr; London: SCM Press, 2023).
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).
Notes
1 “Postcode” is a British and Australian term broadly corresponding to “zipcode” in US usage.
2 “The monster of racism” is a term coined by Kenneth Leech, who did so much to combat racism in the Church of England. As he argues, “race” is “biological fiction,” “alternative gospel,” and an affront to the gospel of Jesus, while its cognate “racism” is “a practiced and lived reality… alive and well” within a wider framework of injustice and oppression which if not also in view obscures clarity about racism manifesting in it. See Stephen Burns, “Kenneth Leeth (1939–2014),” in Twentieth Century Anglican Theologians: From Evelyn Underhill to Esther Mombo, ed. Stephen Burns, Bryan Cones, and James Tengatenga (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 172.
3 Maybe Rosemary Radford Ruether, America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence (Sheffield: Equinox, 2007) could be more widely read in liturgical studies in the US? The only time it has been referenced in this journal is in my “A Postcard from Narrm,” Liturgy 38, no. 1 (2023): 11-17.
4 Consider, too, the evocative distinction between location and dwelling made by Michael N. Jagessar, “Decolonial Challenges and Opportunities,” Liturgy 26, no. 4 (2022): 28–34, which can be applied to US settings. “While located in Britain, it is not the space/place from where I write, think, and engage. I write, think, and engage from Guyana-Caribbean, in a place where I dwell….” (28; emphasis in original).
5 What I am trying to do here is turn and stretch a challenge of R.S. Sugirtharajah that I have come to think is immensely important, but is much neglected, in liturgical studies: to reflect on links between “European expansionism” and the rise of one’s discipline. See references to Sugirtharajah in Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011), 2 and 33, as one way to make a start.
6 See Stephen Burns, “Liturgy and the Search for Deeper Communion,” Liturgy 39, no. 1 (2024).
7 See Gerard Moore, “Sacramentality: An Australian Perspective,” in Christian Worship in Australia: Inculturating the Liturgical Tradition, ed. Stephen Burns and Anita Monro (Strathfield: St Pauls, 2009), 139–154.
8 We are sorry that one invited author was unable to complete due to illness, and we send well wishes.
9 See https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/to_a_louse/. In contemporary English, the poem might read:
Oh, would some Power the gift give us
to see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
and foolish notion:
what airs in dress and gait would leave us,
and even devotion!