Worship and Creation, on a Planet in Peril

This Summer Study course will explore intersections between Christian practices of worship and understandings of creation and the cosmos. Some of the specific intersections highlighted during the course will include both biblical and historical materials and insights as well as contemporary ones. Special attention will be paid to the many creation-attuned liturgical resources that have emerged over recent years as well as the ecumenical initiatives around the official establishment of a “Season of Creation” and, more specifically, a “Feast of Creation” in the liturgical calendars of the churches. Overall, the course seeks to highlight the many ways in which a vision of Christian worship as rooted in God’s creation is both ancient and also vibrantly new, as we confront ever more deeply our own time of ecological emergency.

The course will be taught seminar-style, i.e., with a mix of lecture materials and student-led discussions of assigned readings and other materials. The assignments for the week will include the slow-reading of texts (therefore: of a manageable number of pages) in preparation for class time; viewing of some short videos, including music videos; and written responses to prompts offered by the instructor. All texts to be read will be posted in Canvas or e-mailed directly to students prior to the course sessions. 

This Summer Study course is open to a broad range of levels of prior experience and expertise with the topic (including none).

Professor Berger’s scholarly interests lie in the fields of liturgical studies and Catholic theology; she holds doctorates in both.  Her focus for many years was the intersection of these disciplines with gender theory. More recently, Professor Berger has turned her attention to questions of liturgy and creation, and to liturgical practices in digital worlds. She is currently at work on a monograph titled Benedicite: All Creation Worships. Her publications include an edited volume, Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (2019), and a monograph titled @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (2018).  Earlier publications include Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History (2011); Fragments of Real Presence (2005); and a video documentary, Worship in Women’s Hands (2007). Professor Berger has also written on the hymns of Charles Wesley and on the liturgical thought of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival. She coedited, with Bryan Spinks, the volumes Liturgy’s Imagined Pasts (2016) and The Spirit in Worship–Worship in the Spirit (2009) and served as editor of Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace (2012). Originally from Germany, Professor Berger has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Mainz, Münster, Berlin, and Uppsala. In 2003, she received the distinguished Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church, and in 2025, the Berakah Award from the North American Academy of Liturgy.