Past Event: Conference | Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation

1:15 p.m. Shuttle bus leaves downtown hotels for conference venue; continues to run back and forth.

4:00 p.m. Last shuttle departure from hotels for conference.

~~~~~

1:30 p.m. Conference check-in opens; coffee available | Sarah Smith Gallery

2:30 p.m.Welcome Remarks |Marquand Chapel

2:45 p.m.Plenary Session |Marquand Chapel

• ‘Bless the Lord, fire and heat’: Reclaiming Daniel’s Cosmic Liturgy for Contemporary Eco-Justice 
  Anathea Portier-Young

3:45 p.m. Short break

4:00 p.m. Plenary Session | Marquand Chapel

• ‘The First-Fruits of God’s Creatures’: Bread, Eucharist, and the Ancient Economy 
  Andrew McGowan

5:00 p.m. Reception | Common Room

6:00 Shuttle bus departs from main entrance for downtown hotels; makes additional runs as necessary 

Dinner on your own.

8:30 a.m.      Shuttle bus leaves downtown hotels for conference venue; continues to run back and forth

10:00 a.m.    Last shuttle departure from hotels for conference

~~~~~

8:30 a.m.      Coffee available in Common Room

9:00 a.m.      Plenary Session | Marquand Chapel

• The Crux of the Cosmos in the Art of Fifth-Century Rome
  Felicity Harley-McGowan

10:00 a.m.    Coffee break | Common Room

10:30 a.m.    “On Earth as It Is in Heaven” Theology Panel

• David Grumett: The World as Christ’s Body: Problems and Possibilities
• Kevin Irwin: Contemporary Sacramental/Liturgical Theology in Light of LAUDATO SI
• Mary McGann: Troubled Waters, Troubling Initiation Rites

12:15 p.m.   Lunch Break (lunch provided) | Common Room

2:00 p.m.     Break-Out Session I | Various rooms as indicated

Gail Ramshaw: “The earth is full of your glory” | Marquand Chapel

• Arman Shokhikyan: The Role of Non-human Creation in Armenian Blessing Services: Towards an Ecological Reading of Armenian Euchologion | Niebuhr Hall (via Skype)
• Duco Vollebregt: Night or Dawn? Easter Night in Light of Cosmos and Creation | ISM Great Hall
• Rhodora Beaton: Mirroring the Other in Worship | RSV Room

3:00 p.m.     Coffee break | Common Room

3:30 p.m.     Plenary Session | Marquand Chapel

• Sanctity, Sin, and the Secular at Medieval Rogationtide
  Nathan Ristuccia

4:30 p.m.     Shuttle bus departs from main entrance for downtown hotels; makes additional runs as necessary 

BREAKFAST ON YOUR OWN

9:30 a.m.     Plenary Session | Omni Hotel: College Room

• A Spring of Blessing: Creation and Sanctification in Byzantine Liturgy and Piety
  Nicholas Denysenko

10:30 a.m.   Coffee break

11:00 a.m.   Break-Out Session II | Omni Hotel: meeting rooms as indicated

• Benjamin Stewart: Wisdom’s Buried Treasure: Ecological Cosmology in Funeral Rites | Whalley Room
• Paul Galbreath: Baptism and Ecology: The Search for a Rite that Connects the Dots | Chapel AB Room
• Margot Fassler: The Cosmos and the Liturgy in Hildegard’s Scivias | George A Room
• James Sabak: Keeping Vigil in Embertides | George B Room
   

12:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)

2:30 p.m.     Break-Out Session III | Omni Hotel: meeting rooms as indicated

• Peter Jeffery: The Six Nights of Creation in the Hymns of the Roman Breviary | Whalley Room
• Bert Groen: Environment and Eucharist  | Chapel AB Room
• Joris Geldhof: Ordo Missae 2002/2008 and Transformations of Creation | George B Room
• Stelyios Muksuris: “God in the Midst of Gods”: A Theocentric in the Basilian Κοσμοθεωρία and the Byzantine Prothesis Rite | George A Room

3:30 p.m.    Free time (on your own)

5:30 p.m.     Keynote Address | Trinity Church on the Green

• Naming the World: Liturgy and the Transformation of Time and Matter
  The Rt Revd Dr Rowan Williams

7:00 p.m.     Banquet (optional) | Omni Hotel; separate registration required

9:00 a.m.      Coffee and Discussion with Rowan Williams | Omni College Room

• Light continental breakfast

10:00 a.m.    “Sing, Ye Heavens” Music Panel 

• M. Jennifer Bloxam: Cum angelis et archangelis: Singing a Sacramental Cosmology in the Medieval Christian West
• Gerald C. Liu: Liturgical Free Association with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and In a Silent Way
• Braxton Shelley: Singing in the Spirit: Gospel Song, Materiality, and Transcendence

11:30 a.m.    Concluding Remarks

12:00 p.m.    Conference Ends

Abstract

An inextricable link between liturgy and cosmos is established as foundational to the life of worship at the heart of the Old Testament scriptures in two key texts: the liturgical poem of creation in Genesis 1 and the design of the wilderness tabernacle in Exodus 25–31 and 35–40. These texts also showcase, in subtle but powerful ways, a further link between sacred liturgy and social, economic, and ecological justice. This link becomes more explicit in the Greek versions of Daniel 3, wherein the heroes Azariah, Hananiah, and Mishael choose to enter a flaming furnace rather than participate in the pan-imperial liturgy instituted by Nebuchadnezzar. Coercive worship of the golden statue celebrates the extraction and exploitation of human and natural resources from every corner of the empire. By contrast, an alternative, counter-imperial liturgy celebrates God’s justice and cosmic rule, transforming the flaming furnace into a temple. From amid the flames the worshipers address God and angels, but also stars, sun and moon, sky, water, wind, and fire. They call upon day and night, cold and heat, mountains and streams, and vegetation and creatures from every climate and habitation to bless the Lord. God’s mercy and saving power are, in this impromptu liturgy, not only for human benefit, but for all the cosmos to acknowledge and celebrate. Participation in cosmic worship locates human suffering within a wider, ecological frame and prompts reflection on the meaning of mercy and justice for all God’s creation.

Anathea Portier-Young studied Classics at Yale before attending Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley for a Master of Arts in Biblical Languages. She earned her PhD in Religion, in the field of Hebrew Bible, at Duke University, where she has also taught Old Testament and Hebrew Bible for more than 15 years. She is an expert in early Jewish literature and in gender, sexuality, and the body in the literature of the Old Testament. Her first book, Apocalypse against Empire, Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism, received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger award for theological promise. Her current book project, Prophecy in the Body, argues that biblical prophecy is portrayed as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon that cannot be reduced to message, word, or utterance. She is co-editor with Gregory Sterling of a book in press entitled Scripture and Justice: Catholic and Ecumenical Perspectives.  

Abstract: In the first two centuries or so Christians met to share substantial meals centered on the Mediterranean staple foods of bread and wine. While recent scholarship has given fresh attention to the ancient meal and its significance, the foods themselves have received less attention. Early Christian sources rarely if ever give sustained consideration to eucharistic food and drink, but this does not mean they did not have “implicit meanings,” to borrow Mary Douglas’ term. Among these, the significance of bread as staple food in a society where hunger was often a daily reality is foundational. Since ancient political systems worked to supply and to manipulate crops and consumers, the supply and sharing of bread was not a neutral act. Reconsidering some references to bread and its consumption in early Christian literature in the light of evidence for the production and particularly the distribution of grain and bread, this paper suggests the Eucharist functions as sign of an economy of plenty, and as means of establishing a distinct divine polity or clientela.

Andrew McGowan was appointed Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School in 2014. An Anglican priest and historian, his scholarly work focuses on the life of early Christian communities, and on aspects of contemporary Anglicanism. Professor McGowan’s project of re-describing early eucharistic practice in relation to ancient food and meals is found in Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford, 1999) and in subsequent articles and chapters produced in conversation with members of the Meals in the Greco-Roman World group of the Society of Biblical Literature. His most recent book, Ancient Christian Worship (Baker Academic, 2014) seeks to describe discursive and ritual practice in the ancient Church, including use of music and speech as well as sacramental ritual, and to acknowledge the diversity of early Christian belief and practice. He is currently working on how early Christian and other ancient Mediterranean groups used, changed, and created notions of sacrifice.

Before coming to Yale Professor McGowan was Warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. He was an member of the General Synod of the Australian Anglican Church and of its Doctrine Commission, contributing to published conversations on environmental theology, restorative justice, and the theology of worship. He continues as editor of the Journal of Anglican Studies. He blogs at Andrew’s Version (abmcg.blogspot.com) and is on Twitter as @BerkeleyDean (for Yale- and Church-related topics and higher education) and @Praxeas (for ancient world and personal interests).

Abstract: In Rome during the fourth and fifth centuries, artists, craftsmen and their theological advisers actively developed complex images of paradise and of God’s triumph or glory in heaven. The most celebrated examples are those devised for the decoration of apses in public liturgical contexts; yet iconographic variations on this theme are also found on private devotional objects and in funerary art, demonstrating the diversity of contexts in which these visions of paradise were experienced. Created through the interlacing of traditional Greco-Roman scenes of nature and details plucked from apocalyptic writings, the images are often understood in purely eschatological terms. However recent scholarship has emphasised their role in pictorially asserting the belief in Christ as pantocrator, or sovereign of the cosmos. This paper will suggest that this period of experimentation with visions of paradise and theophany furnished the necessary foundation for the formulation of a particularly innovative image of Christ as ruler: the crucified Christ, his triumph acclaimed by the apostles in the heavenly Jerusalem for eternity.

Felicity Harley-McGowan is a specialist in early Christian and medieval art. Her work centers on the origins and development of Christian iconography within the visual culture of Roman late antiquity. She has held research fellowships at the Warburg Institute, and the British School at Rome, and from 2005-2014 was the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art at the University of Melbourne. Since 2014 she has taught at Yale in the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies.

Abstract: The theologians Grace Jantzen, Matthew Fox, and John Keenan have each in different ways presented the world as God’s body. This intuition has considerable constructive potential, but needs to be articulated with care if it is to find acceptance in the theological mainstream. In this 30-minute presentation I shall review a discourse stretching from Ephesians through Novatian, Hilary of Poitiers, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, Martin Luther, Gottfried Leibniz, and Maurice Blondel, in which Christ’s continuing and embodied action upon and within the created order is regarded as fundamental to its character and ongoing existence. This suggests that, although it seems difficult to speak of the world as God’s body, we might say that the world is the body of Christ.

Dr David Grumett is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, UK and author of Material Eucharist (Oxford University Press, 2016). In this book, he seeks to recover a constructive eucharistic theology grounded in the material elements of bread and wine, and their spiritual transformation into the body and blood of Christ, that may find cross-denominational acceptance. A wide range of primary liturgical and theological texts are engaged, and the horizons of eucharistic theology are extended beyond a church setting to the larger created order. David has also published widely on modern French Catholic theology and on theology and food, and has contributed to the liturgy of several churches, chapels, and cathedrals.

Abstract: Taking its lead from Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, this presentation will offer the shape and contours of a contemporary sacramental/liturgical theology that is ecologically sound, traditionally based and which offers contemporary challenges. Download program details

Monsignor Kevin W. Irwin is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. Serving on The Catholic University of America faculty for over thirty years, Msgr. Irwin held the Walter J. Schmitz, Chair of Liturgical Studies from 2000-2015, served as the Dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies from 2005-2011, and currently holds the position of Ordinary Research Professor. Msgr. Irwin’s most recent books are The Sacraments: Historical Foundations and Liturgical Theology (Paulist Press, 2016) and A Commentary on Laudato Si’: Examining the Background, Contributions, Implementation, and Future of Pope Francis’s Encyclical (Paulist Press, 2016). His work on creation and sacramentality in the past decade involves participation in the USCCB’s annual scholars’ conferences on ecology, the environment, and climate change, where he delivered major papers entitled “The World as God’s Icon: Creation, Sacramentality and Liturgy” (1997) and “God’s Icon: Creation, Liturgy, and Spirituality” (2012); subsequently published in Environmental Justice and Climate Change, ed. J. Schaefer and T. Winwright (Lexington Books, 2013). His research in this area has also led to his current commentary work on Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’.

Abstract: The global water crisis – one of the most serious humanitarian-ecological challenges facing the planetary community today – is re-contextualizing the symbolic use of water in Christian initiation. This presentation explores how the desecration, contamination and commodification of Earth’s waters not only threaten the integrity of water as foundational element for life on the planet, and place acute burdens on vulnerable populations worldwide, but also shape perceptions of water that undermine its sacredness and value as gift and blessing, rooted in the cosmic mystery and generosity of God. In response, the presentation sketches an ethical-ecological-sacramental framework that might inform the teaching, practice, and theology of Christian initiation.

Dr. Mary E. McGann, RSCJ, is Chair of the Religion and Practice Department of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and Adj. Associate Professor of Liturgical Studies at the Jesuit School of Theology, a member school of the GTU. In articles, classes, and lectures she explores the relationship of ecology and worship, with special focus on water and food resources. She is currently writing The Meal That Reconnects: Eucharistic Eating and the Global Food Crisis, to be published by Liturgical Press.

Abstract: Traditional Christian prayer assumes God’s good creation, an original paradise, the fall, death as punishment, and humans with immortal souls. With the refrain “The earth is full of your glory,” Gail Ramshaw’s Earth Eucharistic Prayer published in 2017 proposes praise and petition at the communion table that is more scientifically informed and without recourse to myth: thus, humans are mortal creatures living on a planet on which life contended with death from its very beginnings. Can such ecological prayer be genuinely Christian, centered in the death and resurrection of Christ? 

Gail Ramshaw studies and crafts liturgical language from her home outside of Washington, D.C. A member of Societas Liturgica, a past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy and a recipient of its Berakah award, and Professor Emerita of religion at La Salle University, she has written extensively about biblical metaphors, the Revised Common Lectionary, and congregational liturgical practice. Her primary publications include Treasures Old and New: Images in the Lectionary (2002) and Pray, Praise, and Give Thanks: A Collection of Litanies, Laments, and Thanksgivings at Font and Table (2017). 

Abstract: The Role of Non-Human Creation in Armenian Blessing Services: Towards an Ecological Reading of Armenian Euchologion

The question of relation between ecology and liturgy is currently widely discussed also in Orthodox tradition, with eminent authors such as John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Theocritoff and recently Christina Gschwandtner, arguing that Orthodox Christianity offers a unique spiritual resources especially suited to the environmental concerns of today. However, despite their considerable contribution to the field, these theologians attention was on Byzantine liturgical tradition, rarely compared with Oriental Orthodox Churches’ liturgical and theological visions. In this regard, the paper will critically adapt the insights of neo-patristic synthesis in conversation with Armenian liturgical tradition. This will offer a fresh look at and a new examination of Armenian blessing services in particular subjecting their meanings to the neo-patristic and in some cases also to the latest western theological and liturgical discussions. Specifically, I will look at Water Blessing, Blessing of grapes and Myron (holy oil) Blessing in order to show how the material world is embedded in these liturgies. Particularly, applying the insights from Gordon Lathrop, Andrew Davison and Alexander Schmemann to Armenian practice of blessing, I will offer new connections between Armenian blessing services and contemporary ecological concerns.

Shokhikyan - Presentation Handout 1 - ​Water Blessing

Shokhikyan - Presentation Handout 2 - Ceremony of Blessing of Grapes

Arman Shokhikyan’s masters research explored the Quest for historical Jesus, focusing on the Christological significance of the Quest and trying to bring to dialogue history and faith issues. Recently he has been interested in the Armenian understanding of original sin in regard to its Latin and Byzantine theological background. Shokhikyan’s current research project is on Eucharistic Ecclesiology, in particular on comparative reading of Armenian and Byzantine Eucahristic Ecclesiologies together.

Abstract: The cosmic cycles of night and day have a great symbolic significance in the spirituality of the early Church and in the writings of the Church Fathers. The Exultet, one of the oldest blessing prayers of the Easter candle during Easter night, situates itself firmly in the night, but also characterises the Easter candle as an evening sacrifice and invokes the morning star as a symbol of the risen Christ. Does this mean that Easter Night, in invoking the morning star in the Exultet, is looking forward to dawn as the symbolic moment of the resurrection? Or has the night of Easter an intrinsic symbolic value of its own? I will argue, on the basis of the Exultet in its original context in the Gallican Missale Gothicum (ed. Els Rose) that this reference to the morning star is not suggesting that Easter Night is looking forward to dawn as the symbolic moment of the resurrection, but rather that the invocation of this symbol serves to highlight the sacredness of the entire night of Easter, whose brilliance and splendour of abundant light blends evening and morning, night and day, Christ sacrificed and Christ risen, into one single “day” of festivity.

Duco Vollebregt is a doctoral researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the Catholic University of Louvain (KU Leuven, Belgium). He is a member of the Research Unit of Pastoral and Empirical Theology and of the Liturgical Institute. He studied history at Leiden University, medieval studies at Utrecht University (both in the Netherlands) and theology at the KU Leuven.

His research focuses on the symbolic and ritual use of night and light (in the night) during the Easter Vigil as night of transition and initiation, particularly in the sacramentaries of a variety of Latin liturgical traditions of the early Middle Ages. These traditions are, most importantly, the Milanese (or “Ambrosian”), the Roman (or Romano-Frankish), the Gallican and the Spanish (or “Mozarabic”) traditions. His research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Joris Geldhof (KU Leuven).

Abstract: Ongoing theological conversations about ecology and cosmology, particularly in the context of worship life, are increasingly focused on the human being as embodied and within the context of creation. The role of the human brain (part of the body) as receptor and processor of language, song, and sensory experience has not received much recent attention in liturgical conversations, but it is equally critical to a non-dualistic theological and anthropological understanding of humanity’s role in worship. This paper will consider the principle of sacramentality in conversation with recent discoveries regarding language evolution, mirror neurons, and the ways that human brains interact with one another (social neuroscience). It will suggest that the words and symbols of the liturgical celebration are not only an expression of human worship directed to God, but also an exercise of full humanity considered in sacramental relationship with God, with other animals, and with our evolutionary ancestors.

Rhodora Beaton is Associate Professor of Liturgical and Sacramental Theology at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, MO.  Before joining the faculty at Aquinas Institute in 2017, she taught for eight years at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN.  She is the author of Embodied Words, Spoken Signs, Sacramentality and the Word in Rahner and Chauvet (Fortress Press, 2014) and Illuminating Unity: Four Perspectives on Dei Verbum’s‘One Table of the Word of God and the Body of Christ’ (Liturgical Press, 2014), as well as other essays and articles. 

Abstract: Rogationtide—if it is observed at all—is now rarely more than a folk fertility rite. But in the early Middle Ages, Rogationtide was the second most important holiday of the year. Through the Rogation procession, medieval Christians enacted a vision of their place within the kingdom, the local social order, and the created world. Modern attempts to revive the Rogation Days will fail unless this entire social imaginary revives alongside the feast.

Nathan Ristuccia teaches Latin at Rockbridge Academy in Maryland.  Before moving to Rockbridge, he taught European history for several years at the University of Chicago. His first book, Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual Interpretation, is in production with Oxford University Press, expected spring 2018.

Abstract: The Byzantine liturgical tradition has several offices for the blessing of waters. The Church asks for Christ’s presence in the water at Baptism, the great blessing of waters on Theophany, and several shorter offices throughout the year. This lecture presents several images of the inherent holiness of water and matter by drawing from Byzantine liturgical offices of water blessing and the people’s pious practices involving water. A proposal for honoring created matter as the image painted by the divine iconographer is an integral part of the presentation.

Nicholas Denysenko is Elfrieda and Emil Jochum Professor and Chair at Valparaiso University. A graduate of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (M.Div., 2000) and The Catholic University of America (Ph.D., 2008), Denysenko specializes in liturgical theology and Orthodox Christianity. His books include The Blessing of Waters and Epiphany (Ashgate, 2012), Chrismation: A Primer for Catholics (Liturgical Press, 2014), Liturgical Reform After Vatican II: The Impact on Eastern Orthodoxy (Fortress, 2015), and Theology and Form: Contemporary Orthodox Architecture in America and Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). In his research, Denysenko explores the intersections of liturgical history, ritual studies, and pastoral theology, and writes for an ecumenical audience. The grandson of immigrants from Ukraine, Denysenko also writes about the contemporary Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He is a deacon of the Orthodox Church in America, Diocese of the Midwest, since 2003.

Abstract: Scholars normally characterize wisdom literature’s approach to mortality as essentially negative because it typically denies immortality, critiques human exceptionalism, and ignores the possibility of resurrection. This scholarly focus, however, overlooks the affirmative anthropology on which the negations depend: that humans come from and rightly return to the earth and that humans share a fundamental class identity with all other biological creatures. While Christian ritual has at times conserved this earthy dimension of the wisdom tradition, especially in Ash Wednesday and funeral committal rites, I argue that the tradition holds a precarious place in Christian ecological cosmology, given funerary trends that seem to exempt humans from the return to the earth in death and from pan-species solidarity. I demonstrate how the contemporary recovery of natural burial practices within Christian ritual remedies this exemption by embodying ecological dimensions of the wisdom tradition, complementing funerary motifs of resurrection.

Benjamin M. Stewart is Associate Professor of Worship and Director of Advanced Studies at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Ben is author of A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology and serves as convener of the Ecology and Liturgy Seminar of the North American Academy of Liturgy.

Abstract: When Jesus participates in the act of baptism, he models a baptismal way of life that sanctifies creation as God’s good gift. In the story of Jesus’ baptism, the early church fathers and mothers saw a fundamental connection between baptism and ecology. When Jesus entered the water of the Jordan River, all of creation was blessed by his presence. For instance, Melito of Sardis, a second-century bishop, describes Jesus’ baptism as part of a universal baptism in which all creation participates.

In spite of early theological associations, most contemporary baptismal rites make little reference to the world around us.  This presentation will focus on a new baptismal rite  for the revised edition of the Book of Common Worship (Presbyterian Church U.S.A.) that pays careful attention to earth images as integral to baptismal practice and the Christian catechumenate.  The language of this prayer draws on central biblical and theological themes that show the gift of the world around us as a theater of God’s glory and calls us to discipleship in an engaged community that responds to the needs of the world around us.  A renewed Christian worship in our ecologically sensitive time will take its cues from early Christian images of Jesus’ baptism as participation in the cosmos while also pointing to the responsibility of Christian discipleship to care for the world that God created.

Galbreath - Presentation Handout

Paul Galbreath is a professor of theology at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Charlotte.  He came to the seminary in 2005 from the Office of Theology and Worship where he served as a member of the General Assembly staff for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

His first doctorate degree focused on the intersection between narrative criticism, Christology and psychological theory.  He followed the work thesis that focused on a comparison of the narrative approaches of Paul Ricouer and Hans Frei.  An invitation to further theological study in Germany led him to the University of Heidelberg where he wrote a second dissertation that applied the contributions of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language philosophy to a hermeneutic of liturgical language.

An ordained Presbyterian teaching elder, he has served congregations in Clatskanie, Woodburn, and Warrenton, Oregon as well as in Tacoma, Washington.  In 2001, he was elected Moderator of Olympia Presbytery. His service to the church includes leadership roles as a member of the Consultation on Common Texts, a delegate to the English Language Liturgical Consultation, a member of the Sacrament Study Task Force and a member of the Cooperative Committee on Examinations.

One of his primary research interests has focused on sacramental ethics, or ways to explore connections between worship and daily life. This work led to the publication of a trilogy of books:  Leading from the Table (Alban, 2008), Leading through the Water (Alban, 2011) and Leading into the World which respectively examine the eucharist and baptismal liturgies and a Christian commitment to earth care in order to discern sacramental patterns and practices that are a part of our daily life. He published Doxology and Theology (Peter Lang, 2008) and is co-author of the lectionary commentary New Proclamation: Year B, 2011-2012, Advent Through Holy Week (Fortress, 2011). His most recent book is Leading into the World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

In 1981, he married Jan Vincent Galbreath, who works as a speech pathologist in the Asheville area. His interests include art, architecture, film, soccer (particularly the Portland Timbers), and baseball.

Abstract: In this paper, Margot Fassler argues that the ways in which the elements of the universe interact in Hildegard’s treatise Scivias and others of her writings are directly related to the theologian’s exegesis on the sacraments, especially on the Eucharist. Fassler’s work also places the visual arts, music, and poetry in a liturgical and cosmological framework.

Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy, is renowned for her work at the intersection of musicology, liturgical studies, and theology and is a specialist in sacred music of several periods. At Notre Dame she directs the Program in Sacred Music (SMND) and holds joint appointments in Music and in Theology; she is also a fellow in the Medieval and Nanovic Institutes at Notre Dame; and is a past president of the Medieval Academy of America. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2009, Fassler spent a decade as director of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University, where she held the Robert Tangeman Chair of Music History and was appointed in the Institute, the Yale School of Music, and the Yale Department of Music. Her book Gothic Song (2nd edition, Notre Dame Press, 2011), won both the John Nicolas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America and the Otto Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society. Her interdisciplinary approach is demonstrated in her scholarship including The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (Yale University Press), a study informed by close work with architecture (on JSTOR).  The book has won both the Ace Mercers’ International Book Award (for a book on art and religion) and the 2012 Otto Gründler Book Prize (for a book in medieval studies).  This interdisciplinary approach is also reflected in a new book co-authored by with Jeffery Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, and Susan Marti: Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300-1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent. 2 vols. Munster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2016, and in a volume co-edited with Katie A. Bugyis and A.K. Kraebel, Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History, York Medieval Press of Boydell and Brewer, 2017. Also on JSTOR.

Fassler has completed a widely-used textbook on medieval music, now being translated into Spanish: Music in the Medieval West (with its Anthology) (New York, W. W. Norton, 2014 and 2015 respectively). Her new work on Hildegard of Bingen combines study of liturgy, theology, music, drama, and the visual arts, and includes a full-dome digital model (with Christian Jara) based on the treatise Scivias (to be released in Spring, 2019). This work has been supported by both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

In addition to her work as a historian, Fassler is a documentarian, who has made films engaging communities of song within ritual contexts. Completed films include “Work and Pray,” about the Benedictine nuns who sing Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT, “You Can’t Sing it For Them,” about African-American gospel music at Messiah Baptist Church in Bridgeport, CT, and “Where the Hudson Meets the Nile, Teaching Coptic Chant in Jersey City.” These films will be distributed by Folkstreams.net beginning in the Fall, 2018. Fassler has several other edited volumes to her credit, including The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, co-edited with Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford, 2000) and over sixty full-length articles and book chapters. She lectures widely in the USA and in Europe. She has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.

Abstract: A Saturday into Sunday vigil concluded each of the four quarterly observances called Embertides in the ancient Roman liturgical calendar. The Embertides were connected to the seasonal transformations of creation, spring into summer, summer into fall, fall into winter, and winter’s movement into spring. This paper will analyze these vigils’ concern for this periodic articulation of the year and of the role of Sunday within it through an examination of the texts and structure within which these vigils were celebrated. If keeping vigil is an eschatological experience at its core, then would the vigil of these “Quarterly Fasts” channel that eschatological focus to one of the most powerful moments of ancient reckoning, the solstices and equinoxes? An examination of the prayers and scriptural lessons of the vigils, which focus upon the renewal, which awaits all of creation as it moves toward fulfillment, will determine how they express the need to be both mindful of and single-minded toward that reality. This paper proposes that the Ember seasons and in particular their vigils, connected to nothing more eloquent of God than creation itself, may express something of what it means to celebrate vigil qua vigil, or better, Sunday qua Sunday.

James G Sabak, O.F.M., is a Franciscan Friar of Holy Name Province, New York, New York. Born in Seattle, Washington, Fr. Sabak was raised in Niagara Falls, New York, and attended The Catholic University of America (CUA), where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics in 1985.  In 1992 he entered the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans) and was solemnly professed in 1998.  In 1999 he received his Master of Divinity degree from Washington Theological Union, Washington, DC, and was ordained to presbyteral ministry in that same year. From 1999 until 2002 he was Chaplain of the College at Siena College, Loudonville, New York, where he also lectured in the Religious Studies Department. In 2002 Fr. Sabak earned a Master degree in Liturgical Studies, and in 2012 he received his Doctorate both from Catholic University. His doctoral dissertation was entitled, “The Theological Significance of ‘Keeping Vigil’ in Rome from the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries.” While attending CUA, Jim was awarded a Teaching Fellowship in the School of Theology and Religious Studies for instructing undergraduates. He served as Senior Teaching Fellow at CUA from 2005 to 2012 charged with assisting the pedagogical development of the Teaching Assistants and Teaching Fellows in the School. In the fall of 2012 he received appointment as Assistant Professor of Theology at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

Fr. Sabak is a member of Societas Liturgica, the international society on scholarship in the liturgy, and has delivered papers at the Societas conferences in Sydney, Australia; Reims, France; Würzburg, Germany; Quebec, Canada; and Leuven, Belgium. He is a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy and participates in the “Problems in the Early History of the Liturgy” seminar. Fr. Sabak is a co-convener of the seminar in Sacramental Theology of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He serves as Chair of the American Franciscan Liturgical Commission, charged with editing the texts of the Franciscan Mass propers for the revised Roman Missal. He is also National Chaplain of The Catholic University of America Alumni Association. Fr. Sabak has given numerous talks on liturgical theology and pastoral application of the sacraments to a variety of groups and associations.  He is the author of several book reviews, a chapter in Franciscans and Liturgical Life (2006), published by The Franciscan Institute, Saint Bonaventure University, New York, on “A Franciscan Theology of the Eucharist,” and articles in the journals Worship, Studia Liturgica, and Horizons.

Fr. Sabak’s research interests include study on the evolution of the liturgy in the patristic period, particularly in Rome between the fourth and eighth centuries, and analysis of the meaning and significance of Christian and non-Christian ritual enactment and practices in human life and society in ancient and contemporary contexts.

Abstract: With its monastic origins and penitential tone, the daily office celebrated in the Roman Rite before Vatican II does not seem an obvious place to look for a robust, affirming theology of life or creation. When Genesis 1 is read, the antiphons and responsories focus on the Fall of Adam and Eve. The canticle of the three Hebrew children from the book of Daniel was sung every Sunday morning, just before Psalms 148-50, but without provoking any apparent response to the canticle’s command “Bless the Lord all you works of the Lord.”

Where we do find praises for creation is in the strophic hymns, which were composed according to the rules of Latin poetry rather than excerpted from Scripture. The genuine hymns of St. Ambrose, and a sixth-century anonymous corpus known as the Old Hymnal, mark the hours of the day and the alternation of darkness and light. More developed is a sequence of hymns about the seven days of creation, sometimes attributed to Pope Gregory the Great and likely to be from his era. The hymn for each day praises something that was created that day—making it a reminder of our need to avoid and confess our sins.

Jeffery - Presentation Handout

Peter Jeffery grew up in a house full of books and music, in the New York neighborhood immortalized in Spike Lee’s 1994 movie “Crooklyn.” He attended what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, the school which inspired the 1980 movie “Fame.”  At Brooklyn College, Jeffery majored in music composition, an experience which taught him that his real strengths lay in musicology.  Thus he received a PhD in Music History from Princeton University in 1980, with a dissertation entitled “The Autograph Manuscripts of Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676),” about the life work of an early opera composer. This research greatly increased his interest in Gregorian chant.

Jeffery has published over 100 articles and books on a range of topics, in publications that include Early Music History, Studia Liturgica, Jewish Quarterly Review, Theological Studies and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages.  An early article entitled “The Introduction of Psalmody into the Roman Mass by Pope Celestine I (422-432),” published in Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society.  Volume 1 of his book Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant (co-authored with Kay Kaufman Shelemay of Harvard University) received the 1994 Paul Revere Award for Graphic Excellence from the Music Publishers’Association. In 2006 his book Translating Tradition won an Honorable Mention in the “Liturgy” category from the Catholic Press Association.

Shortly after receiving early tenure at the University of Delaware, Jeffery was the first musicologist to receive a “Genius Award” Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1987-92). In 1993 he returned to Princeton as a full professor; since 2009 he has been the Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus there. He came to Notre Dame as the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies, along with his wife, Margot Fassler, to build up the program in Sacred Music.

Abstract: In the Orthodox Church, as well as in some other ecclesial traditions, September 1, the first day of the new church year in the Byzantine rite, is dedicated to the integrity of Creation and environmental protection; specific liturgical services are celebrated. My talk will concentrate on, first, the underlying theology, anthropology, and cosmology: God calls humans to be co-creators, priests, and stewards of Creation. However, humankind rapes nature and might finally destroy itself. Hence a Eucharistic spirituality, giving thanks to the Creator for the beauty and goods of this world, as well as asceticism, are required. Second, I will focus on various worship formularies composed for this day: their contents, structure, performance, and musical setting. Third, I will discuss the new type of ‘Integrity of Creation’ iconography. In addition, I shall examine links with other initiatives, especially the Conciliar Process of Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation (World Council of Churches). A major concern to be addressed is the question of the reception and aftereffects of the worship services, so the question of whether the key triangle of liturgy-doctrine-diakonia/ethics, as well as the interconnectedness of theory and practice, ‘works’.

Groen - Presentation Handout

Basilius Jacobus (Bert) Groen was born in 1953 in the Netherlands. After graduation at a Dutch grammar school he spent a year as a foreign exchange student in the USA (1971-72; graduation at Jamestown High School, North Dakota). Then he studied philosophy and theology in Nijmegen and Amsterdam, as well as liturgy in Trier, Modern Greek in Bonn, and Byzantine art and Orthodox worship in Thessalonica. In Greece he conducted also field work on religious rituals for the sick and needy (1981-84). In 1991 at the University of Nijmegen, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on the sacrament of the anointing of the sick in the Greek Orthodox Church. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, Nijmegen. There he served also as editor-in-chief of the academic review ‘The Journal of Eastern Christian Studies’ (2001-02).

In 2002, he was appointed full professor of liturgical studies and sacramental theology, as well as head of the Institute for Liturgy, Christian Art and Hymnology, University of Graz, Austria. In that university he holds also the UNESCO Chair for Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue in Southeastern Europe (the Balkans). During the academic year 2011-12, he was Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at Yale University (Institute of Sacred Music). In 2014 he held the ‘Sir Daniel and Countess Bernadine Murphy Donohue Chair in Eastern Catholic Theology at Pontifical Oriental Institute’ in Rome, where he is a Visiting Professor. He served as president of the international scholarly ‘Society of Oriental Liturgy’ (2012-14) and is a member of many other international ecumenical and scholarly associations.

Abstract: The basis for the present paper is a meticulous analysis of the Latin text of the most recent ‘typical edition’ of the Order of Mass in the Roman Missal, which is currently in use in the Catholic Church. Inspired by a robust interpretation of the lex ordandi, lex credendi adage and developing further a concrete method for liturgical theology, I will investigate this premier liturgical source with the following questions in mind: How are matter and creation conceived of? What is ‘done’ with creation? What is God requested to do with his creatures? This set of questions, which allows one to include not only discussions about euchological material (legomena) but also interpretations of ritual actions and instructions (drômena), will enable us to draw intriguing conclusions about the ways in which grace and salvation are working in and on nature. We will relate these conclusions with reflections about the pertinence of the celebration of the Eucharist in contemporary cultures and make a case for the importance of a non-instrumentalist view on the contribution of liturgy to (Christian) spirituality and ethics today.

Joris Geldhof (Aalst, 1976) is Professor of Liturgical Studies and Sacramental Theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is coordinator of the Research Unit Pastoral and Empirical Theology and chairs the Liturgical Institute. In the latter capacity he is also the editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal Questions Liturgiques/Studies in Liturgy.

After studies in philosophy, religious studies, and theology at the KU Leuven he obtained a PhD with a study on the provocative nature of the Christian revelation in 2005, which was published as a monograph entitled Revelation, Reason and Reality. Theological Encounters with Jaspers, Schelling and Baader (Leuven: Peeters, 2007). His major areas of interest and expertise are liturgical theology, the Eucharist, and questions pertaining to Christian sacramentality in a secularized world. He edited Mediating Mysteries, Understanding Liturgies: On Bridging the Gap Between Liturgy and Systematic Theology (Leuven: Peeters, 2015) and, together with Marianne Moyaert, Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries – Transgressions – Innovations (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

In August 2017 he became president of Societas Liturgica for a two years term.

Abstract: St. Symeon of Thessalonike’s classic liturgical commentary On the Holy Liturgy, in a remote but extremely significant passage on the completed prothesis rite, envisions a unique eschatological world permeated throughout by the divine presence. The glorified Eucharistic Lamb upon the paten is situated in the midst of a redeemed cosmos, comprised of a transformed creation and humanity imbued with the fullness of grace, united with the God who stands “in the midst of gods.”

A millennium earlier, St. Basil of Cappadocia in his eloquent Anaphora envisions a similar pristine world in which man’s relationship with the cosmos is normalized as a result of the divine economia in Jesus Christ, likewise revealed to the worshiper upon the completion of the eucharistic sacrifice.

In this paper, I will engage in a critical comparative study of both aforementioned texts to expose the foundations of a distinctly Eastern theological approach that views cosmology and ecology in theocentric terms. Intuited in this study will naturally be the urgent expectation to likewise situate mankind at the center of this cosmos, as God’s fellow synergos in the stewardship of cultivating, sanctifying, and redeeming the natural world in which we live.

Fr. Stelyios S. Muksuris, PhD, was born in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey). He immigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of five. As a United States citizen, he was raised and schooled in Boston, MA. Ordained a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America 25 years ago, he now serves the Church with the rank of Protopresbyter at Kimisis Tis Theotokou Greek Orthodox Church in Aliquippa, PA. As Head of the Department of Liturgical History and Theology at the Byzantine Catholic Seminary in Pittsburgh, PA, he is also Full Professor of Liturgical Studies and Languages.

Fluent in several languages, he proudly serves the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the Metropolis of Pittsburgh as a theological consultant on liturgical matters. He is currently in the process of editing and translating a five-volume series on liturgical questions and answers in the Orthodox Christian Tradition, written by the late renowned liturgiologist Ioannes Fountoules of Thessaloniki, Greece.

He is a graduate of Hellenic College (BA, 1990) and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology (MDiv, 1993) in Brookline, MA. He completed his postgraduate studies at Durham University (MLitt, 2000 in Byzantine Patristic Liturgy; PhD, 2008 in Liturgical Theology), where he studied for ten years under the renowned patristic scholar, Professor Fr. Andrew Louth. He is also a ThD candidate in Sacramental Theology, having studied under the renowned Professor of Church History, Fr. Georgios Metallinos.

Fr. Stelyios’ theses are entitled: 1) The Anaphorae of the Liturgy of the Apostles Sts. Addai and Mari and the Byzantine Liturgy of St Basil the Great: A Comparative Study; and 2) Economia and Eschatology: Liturgical Mystagogy in the Byzantine Prothesis Rite (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013).  The book is now in its 3rd printing.

He remains heavily engaged in academia. He has authored numerous scholarly articles in academic journals and books. A frequent speaker at conferences, both nationally and internationally, he remains an active member of various academic societies, including: 1) the American Academy of Religion; 2) the Orthodox Theological Society in America; 3) the Society of Oriental Liturgy; and 4) Societas Liturgica.

Fr. Stelyios enjoys bouzouki music and is an avid reader of archeology, information technology, and the sciences. He also writes musical lyrics and has been an avid musician of the Greek bouzouki for 17 years.  These varied interests have encouraged him to communicate to the world also as a blogger, philosopher, and musician.

Fr. Stelyios presently maintains a weekly blog called Logoi with FrDrStel (doctorssm.wordpress.com(link is external)), which contains many of his theological and philosophical musings.

Rowan Williams served as Archbishop of Canterbury for ten years from 2002 to 2012. Since 2013 he has been master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge.  A Fellow of the British Academy, he speaks or reads nine languages in addition to his native Welsh, and has published many books, including studies of Dostoevsky, Arius, Teresa of Avila, and Sergii Bulgakov, together with writings on a wide range of theological, historical, and political themes. He is also a noted poet and translator of poetry.

Abstract: “Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua!” Music is at the center of the cosmic celebration of liturgy, as captured in the title of our conference – in the Preface these words are placed in the mouths of singing cherubim and seraphim. How was the song of the angelic hosts conceptualized and realized in the medieval Christian West? This presentation will explore a variety of musical styles and techniques employed by medieval composers to make the angelic choir sonically present in worship, with particular attention to the musical role of the Sanctus during the sacramental heart of the Mass in the later Middle Ages.

M. Jennifer Bloxam is a music historian and educator who earned her BMus from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and her PhD from Yale University before joining the faculty of Williams College in 1986. She now serves as the Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Music at Williams, teaching courses on medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, the influence of early music and Bach on nineteenth and twentieth-century music, and the Carmen narrative in music, film, and dance.

As a musicologist focused on sacred music of the Christian West before the Reformation, Bloxam is most intrigued by the ritual and liturgical contexts of sacred polyphony, the interactions between plainsong and polyphony in mass and motet, and strategies of narrative and exegesis in sacred music and the arts. She has a particular affection for the Flemish composer Jacob Obrecht (d.1505), and has published widely about the music of his time in a variety of journals (including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and Early Music History) and essay collections such as The Josquin Companion (Oxford 2000), Early Musical Borrowing (Routledge 2004), The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015), and Studies in the Cultural History of Medieval and Renaissance Music: Liturgy, Sources, Symbolism (Cambridge 2017). She also served as co-editor for “Uno gentile et subtile ingenio”: Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Bonnie Blackburn (Brepols 2009), and has co-edited a volume of essays entitled Exploring Christian Song with Andrew Shenton, in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music (Lexington 2017).

In addition to lecturing widely at conferences and universities in the U.S. and Europe, Bloxam maintains an ongoing collaboration in concerts, recordings, and film projects with the Dutch vocal ensemble Cappella Pratensis directed by Stratton Bull. The first fruits of this alliance of scholarship and performance – the DVD+CD Missa de Sancto Donatiano (Bruges 1487) by Jacob Obrecht (Challenge Records 2010) – was awarded the Diapason d’Or découverte prize. She has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1990 and 2002), and spent the 2013-14 academic year at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music as a Fellow in Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts. She has served on the board of the American Musicological Society and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of Alamire Foundation, and is currently the president of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music.

Abstract: In 1968, William Greaves, nonchalantly became the first African American director, actor, and producer of a feature-length, avant-garde film –Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Oscar Micheaux and Zora Neale Hurston had already laid the foundations of black cinematic artistry two generations ago. Their works also fared far better than the immediately-forgotten but decades-later, critically-praised Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Yet Symbiopsychotaxiplasm represented more than an underground achievement of Greaves. Through a plotless, multilayered and simultaneous, panoramic casting of multiple actors engaging in an absurd and recurring dialogue (one camera films a scene, another the crew, another the actors, crew, and environment, and sometimes Greaves wields his own camera) Symbiopsychotaxiplasm strangely and kaleidoscopically captured how clichéd contexts and inane conversations within them can nevertheless indicate horizons of social acceptance with imprecise theological implications. Greaves recorded redemption. He also embodied it himself. Notably, 2018 marks not only the 50th anniversary of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, but also the Civil Rights Act, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and so much more. My paper examines Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and its soundtrack – In a Silent Way by Miles Davis – as touchpoints for imagining pathways of liturgical widening as we consider the goods of liturgy for ecology and the cosmos.

Gerald C. Liu is assistant professor of worship and preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is editor for the worship section of the journal Homiletic and has recently published the book Music and the Generosity of God (Palgrave, 2017). A son of Buddhist immigrants from Taiwan and ordained in the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church, he also volunteers as a minister in residence at the Church of the Village in Manhattan.

Abstract: Richard Smallwood’s “Hebrews 11”, a musical paraphrase of the passage for which it is named, asserts that faith allows believers to take possession of healing, wholeness, and victories that can transform their earthly experiences. But what is the link between this efficacious faith and the material world? This talk mines the live recording of “Hebrews 11,” arguing that it illumines the conjunction of materiality and transcendence that sustains many expressions of African American Christian worship. The talk contends that in “Hebrews 11” (and throughout the gospel repertory) the commingled materialities of the singing voice, sung text, and sound itself undergird liturgy’s function as a space to re-create the world with the substance from which it first emerged: that is, the word of God. As such, gospel song holds together a network of material anchors through which the transcendent becomes immanent.

Braxton D. Shelley, a musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. His research and critical interests, while currently focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology. After earning a BA in Music and History from Duke University, Shelley received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago. While at the University of Chicago, he also earned a Master of Divinity from the university’s Divinity School. His 2017 dissertation, “Sermons in Song: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination,” developed an analytical paradigm for gospel music that braids together resources from cognitive theory, ritual theory, and homiletics with studies of repetition, form, rhythm and meter.

Recipient of the 2016 Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society and the 2016 Graduate Student Prize from the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, he has presented his research at Amherst College, Duke University, Northwestern University, and Tufts University, as well as at the annual meetings of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, Music Theory Midwest and the American Musicological Society.

His publications include the following essays: “Sounding Belief: ‘Tuning Up’ and The Gospel Imagination,” in Exploring Christian Song, “‘This Must Be The Single’: Valuing The Live Recording in Contemporary Gospel Performance,” in Living the Life I Sing, and “Gospel Goes To Church (Again): Richard Smallwood’s Hybridity as Liturgical Compromise,” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, vol 2. His current projects include an article on the poetics of gospel vamps, an article on music and protest in the North Carolina-based Moral Mondays movement, and a book-length study of African American gospel performance.