Festschrift to honor Teresa Berger

At the final colloquium in May, Professor Melanie Ross held a surprise festschrift for Teresa Berger, Professor of Liturgical Studies and the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology at the ISM and Yale Divinity School. Colleagues joined in-person as well as via Zoom to honor her eminent work in the field of liturgical studies. Professor Berger retired on June 30. Read Professor Ross’ remarks below.

“It is a privilege to say a few words about my friend and colleague, Teresa Berger.  I do so mindful of the fact that the last time Teresa received public accolades in a setting like this, she was quoted as saying, “I have long considered after-dinner speeches to be a lofty form of academic torture.”

Originally from Germany, Teresa has a rich educational background. She holds an undergraduate degree in theology, two master’s degrees, two Ph.Ds, and a post-doctoral degree. She has held visiting teaching positions throughout Europe and spent the first twenty-three years of her career at Duke Divinity School, climbing the ranks from visiting assistant professor to full professor. She joined Yale in 2007, and in 2014, she was named the inaugural Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology. She has won prestigious awards, including Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church in 2003 and the Berakah Award from the North American Academy of Liturgy in 2025. Along the way, she has authored or edited nineteen books and published eighty-six articles and chapters in scholarly venues. If you add those to her other publications, the total number is well over two hundred. Her research has combined liturgical studies, Catholic theology, and gender theory.  She is also one of the first scholars to study online worship experiences and one of the first liturgical scholars to write at the intersection of worship and ecology.

But if these bullet points from her CV are all you know about Teresa, you’ll miss several important things.  First, concurrent with all her academic accomplishments, Teresa has raised her son, Peter.  I think that she is more proud of the young man he has become than she is of all the lines on her CV combined and infinitely multiplied.  Second, we at the ISM know Teresa as a committed Roman Catholic. But she had a very powerful evangelical conversion experience in her teens, and worshiped with Pentecostals for three years.  Later, she was part of a Greek Orthodox community for six years, singing with the choir in Greek every Sunday.  She got her first degree from an Anglican theological college and her master’s from Lutheran faculty. She spent a year with Calvinist faculty in Geneva, and over two decades on a Methodist faculty.  Further, her academic journey is full of fascinating tidbits.  My favorite, perhaps, is the fact that she earned a PhD in Protestant theology by writing about an Anglo-Catholic movement and a PhD in Catholic theology by writing about the hymns of John and Charles Wesley.

When I think about the trajectory of Teresa’s scholarship, the image that comes to mind is that of a helix: a three-dimensional spiral curve.  Think of the way that threads on a bolt continually circle it without touching or overlapping, only moving upward. Taken as a whole, the body of Teresa’s work is much like that helix.  She focuses on a particular concern, then appears to move away to another area of thinking, only to return to her original starting point in a more advanced and nuanced way. Maybe some of you have had the experience of asking about a “hot button” issue in class: Did the early church ordain women?  Are digital sacraments valid?  For Teresa, these are question that you answer only after you’ve looked at a whole other host of coordinates that will help you think and embed the question in the broader realities of Christian liturgical practices. 

Her are just a few examples of this helix pattern. In her 1999 book, Women’s Ways of Worship, she suggested in passing that women’s liturgical lives would be powerfully shaped in the years to come by the experience of cyber-space.  In 2018, she returned to that question – and many others – in @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds. From her earliest publications, Teresa has challenged the field to look for the women in liturgical history – to acknowledge their contributions, materialities, and concerns.  But as her thinking and research continued in later publications, the helix continued to spiral.  It is not enough, she insisted, for us to simply “add women” to preexisting histories. Instead, she proposed new methodologies, arguing that we must be attentive to the ways in which the church has always gendered liturgical practices.  In her most recent work, she circles back to the foundations of her discipline, which has long been pre-occupied with a post-Vatican II emphasis on liturgy as a dialogue between God and humanity.  In the face of the current ecological crisis, she warns that “proceeding with liturgical studies as before is akin to ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’, as the saying goes – or maybe, more on topic: praying the Divine Office on an ocean liner about to collide with a melting iceberg.” The list could go on and on.  Teresa’s late friend and colleague, Nathan Chase, summarized her scholarship well when he noted the cantus firmus cross her work is “a prophetic voice concerned for those on the margins of history and the church, for the voiceless, and for practices and pieties deemed outside the so-called norm.”

Professor Berger was named after Saint Teresa of Avila, who once wrote of herself, “they say that I have no small amount of [courage], and that God has given me more than women usually have.”  Professor Berger is a pioneer, and she possesses her patron saint’s courage in spades. When she entered the field of liturgical studies in the early 1980s, she had never been taught be a woman in her field. Not only was the liturgical studies male-centered, it was also priest-centered and much of the scholarship was produced in monasteries.  Teresa, I hope that today, some fifty years later, when you look at the field of academic liturgical studies and see the stunning diversity of genders, ethnicities, research interests, and methodologies it embraces – that you can take great pride knowing the tremendous role you played in changing the status quo.

Congratulations on your well-earned retirement.  We have no doubt that, much like the open-ended helix, your research, writing, and learning will continue to soar and spiral upwards, touching countless lives and minds in ways we can only begin to imagine.”