Welcome and Forward

Director’s Welcome

The Colloquium is the lively enterprise at the heart of the Institute’s mission. At this weekly meeting, scholars, ministers, church musicians, performers, and artists – present and future – engage each other. In this space, we attempt to make more permeable the natural frontiers of our disciplines. Here, at the very least, musicians and artists can learn of the liturgical and theological contexts from which the tools of their trade come. Scholars and ministers gain a much broader understanding for how theology is done beyond the saying and writing of texts.

This conversation reinvents itself with every new topic and every new group of students, and with this journal and DVD, we extend this conversation to you, our readers and viewers. We hope that you will find truth and insight between the covers of this second volume of the Colloquium Journal, and that this knowledge will help you in your work, whatever it may be.

Martin Jean

Director of ISM and Organ Professor

Foreword

Colloquium: Music, Worship, Arts

The mission of the Institute states that we sponsor a “vital interdisciplinary program that brings musicians, presiders, and scholars together for common conversation and formation,” and this new volume of Colloquium continues to demonstrate some of the ways in which this part of our mission is fulfilled. Film has become a regular part of our classroom teaching, and we continue to build a film archive. Ronald Grimes discusses the delights and dangers of film in his Aidan Kavanagh Lecture. His discussion reminds us that just as what is regarded as important in a liturgical text may reside less in the text than in the mind of the scholar, so all films are made to highlight what was significant to the camera person and subsequent editors.

As invaluable as film is, it is never a substitute for actual worship, and as contemporary as it may be, a film becomes history. Our Colloquium presenters remind us that consideration of contemporary practices cannot long avoid discussion with the past—with history. Archbishop Rowan Williams’s recent book Why Study the Past? argues that good history is a moral affair because it opens up a point of reference that is distinct from us, yet not wholly alien. The past can then enable us to think with more varied and resourceful analogies about our identity in the often confusing present.

Markus Rathey puts Bach’s Mass in B Minor in historical perspective for us, and Michael Hawn illustrates how particular hymns have been rewritten and adapted for newer times and situations. The importance of sound theological reflection is brought home to us by John Witvliet’s reflection on Trinitarian theology and worship, and the need to engage with both a global culture and a postmodern culture is underlined by I-to Loh, Quentin Faulkner, John McClure, and Carol Wade.

This issue includes a new section, Authors’ Perspectives, in which Institute faculty and invited scholars who work in sacred music, ritual studies, and the arts speak about their new work.

The editors are grateful to all our contributors, and to the students, faculty, and staff of the Institute for their work on this journal.

Bryan D. Spinks

Professor of Liturgical Studies

Chair of the Program in Liturgical Studies

Margot E. Fassler

Tangeman Professor of Music History and Liturgy