Liturgy 39.1: The US and Us: To See Ourselves as Others See Us

Issue 39.1 of Liturgy is entitled “The US and Us: To See Ourselves as Others See Us” and is guest-edited by Stephen Burns and Andrew Wymer. What follows is an excerpt from Burns’ and Wymer’s introduction to the issue.

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This issue of Liturgy invites the extension of imagination to how people might live with and within American culture from outside the US, as they inevitably also contend with that culture thanks to Hollywood and many products. That is, whether or not people have US citizenship, and live on US soil, lots of people are encountering, engaging with, presence, absence, marks, or shadows, of “America.” Think of things as apparently innocuous as telephone country codes: the US is #001, and for example Australia follows at #061. Think of web addresses, in which the US tends to be invisible in suffixes, with no further appellation: so the US is .edu, and for example Australia is .edu.au. Consider journal titles: the one in front of you is just Liturgy, whereas for example an Australian counterpart names its context as Australian Journal of Liturgy. Even the term “American” requires significant troubling. How did one country out of the thirty-five internationally recognized nation states and possibly thousands of sovereign, indigenous tribal nations represented in North and South America become the “American” nation? Hence the reader will notice that authors in this issue sometimes use the awkward term “US-ian” as an intentional alternative. It denotes those who live in the US and are to varying degrees assimilated within domestic culture and affairs, while inviting recognition that people beyond the US claim identity as American, in other countries on the continent.

The basic contention of this issue of Liturgy is that because the US is so dominant in at least English-language liturgical production, it could be good to pursue questions across cultures, around borders, over oceans—even as pursuit of gifts in tow might mean a bit of stumbling around sometimes. It seems we are not very used to such conversation.

We are profoundly aware that this issue represents only the start of a more organized conversation about US-ian influence in liturgical theology and practice. Though the voices here represent as diverse a range of perspectives as we could muster in the time we had to put this issue together, this issue also contains silences brought about by the human limitations of our own awareness, the exclusive nature of scholarly discourse in English, and the limited reach of our relationships. We proceed in awareness of how many relationships are yet to be formed and voices yet to be heard, and we hope that this issue represents an invitation to further conversation. In this vein, we have taken practical steps as editors to create a tangibly hospitable environment. You will find a variety of cultural references, figures of speech, syntax, terminology, spellings, and writing conventions that reflect the array of geographical and social locations from which participants in this issue hail. We encourage you to enjoy these as invitations to listen more closely and to encounter other lenses through which to interpret worship, preaching, learning, and liturgical studies.

Gerard Moore undertook his doctoral studies at Catholic University of America in Washington DC, USA, before returning to Australia where he lives in Sydney. As in some of his other writing, here Moore carefully reflects on distinctive aspects of Australian culture as these pertain to liturgy, and he especially explores difference between American and his particular “Antipodian” location.

Jaewoong Jung, who went for his doctoral studies to Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, USA, then invites a postcolonial slant on how the US has impacted liturgical developments in his own Korea, to which he returned.

Lis Valle-Ruiz’s work examines how Presbyterian missionary work in Puerto Rico exerted colonial influence on worship practices and how this was met with liturgical resistance. Providing a detailed historical case study of the influence of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Valle-Ruiz—who holds a doctorate from Vanderbilt Divinity School—reflects on decolonial futures for worship that may invite all readers on carefully nurturing more decolonial worship spaces.

Gennifer Benjamin Brooks provides a glimpse into the complex interaction of Trinidadian worship with US-ian influences amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Brooks, who grew up in Trinidad and continues to nurture personal and professional relationships there, holds a PhD in liturgical studies from Drew University Theological School. In this essay she utilizes a conversational approach with Trinidadian ministers to trace the complicated colonial legacies that underlie US-ian influence in Trinidad and the ways in which that impact is marked by ambiguity.

In contrast to others contributing to this issue, Bryan Cones (the editor of Australian Journal of Liturgy) moved away from the US for doctoral study. He writes here in “Cultural Exchanges” about his particular “pilgrimage” from the perspective of a US-ian abroad who moved from Chicago to the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia, to earn his PhD.

Stephen Burns did his doctoral work at Durham University in England, his homeland, before migrating to Australia. He has also spent a short time in the US. His article explores twenty or so years of output of this journal, looking for how the US seems to present in it, asking also about the rest of the world.

Finally, Andrew Wymer, a US-ian who has spent time over the northern border in Canada and who gained his doctorate at the institution in which he now teaches, Garrett Evangelical, provides a wider frame for the kind of explorations others undertake in this issue. Wymer insists on the importance of the “law of justice,” a principle that must consciously keep being brought to liturgical work.

In various ways, then, this issue proceeds in the spirit of famed Scot Robert Burns’ well-known lines in “To a louse,” written late in the eighteenth-century. The poet is in church and spots a parasite on a fancy lady’s hat, commenting:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An’ foolish notion:

What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,

An’ ev’n devotion!

So, to see ourselves as others see us may free us from foolish blunders. Or so we may hope.

Welcome to the conversation; come join this shared quest for wisdom.