Where are the women when it comes to the liturgical life of the Catholic Church? What role does gender play? How did our liturgical traditions develop? Our liturgical history has been shaped substantially by the invisibility and exclusion of women. How credible can this historical narrative be with so much of the Body of Christ missing?
Yale Divinity School Professor Teresa Berger has spent a lifetime examining both past and present liturgical developments from the perspective of women’s lives. In this presentation she will offer insights into the roles women played in Early Christianity, the history of women’s liturgical ministries, and the development of the calendar of saints and the uneven ways we have come to formally venerate women within the tradition.
Biography
Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies and Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Professor Berger teaches in the fields of liturgical studies and Catholic theology; she holds doctorates in both. Her scholarly interests for many years lay at 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. Her most recent 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 volume Liturgy’s Imagined Pasts (2016) as well as the collection of essays The Spirit in Worship–Worship in the Spirit (2009) and served as editor of the volume of essays titled Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace (2012). An active Roman Catholic, Professor Berger regularly writes for the liturgy blog “Pray Tell.” Originally from Germany, she 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.
Dr. Berger takes up the subject of worship as a practice intrinsically related to bodies and gender—a complex matter, both now and historically.
In April 2015, Dr. Berger was honored by YDS as the holder of the recently endowed Golden Professorship, the school’s first named chair in Catholic theology.