Proceedings of the North American Academy of Liturgy 2020

Queering Liturgy Convener: W. Scott Haldeman (Convener pro tem standing in for Sharon Fennema), Associate Professor of Worship, Chicago Theological Seminary Members in Attendance: Susan Blain, Steph Budwey, Bryan Cones, Jill Crainshaw, Scott Haldeman, Jason McFarland, Mike McMahon, Lis Valle-Ruiz, Janet Walton Visitors in Attendance: Kat Olson, Terry Todd, Dan Schlorff Description of Work: Always operating, fittingly, just outside of the normal within the academy, the seminar experimented with a new meeting schedule model in Atlanta. We held conversations all day Friday, had discussions over dinner on both Thursday and Friday evenings, and, then, dispersed to other seminars on Saturday. The experiment was successful, allowing, again, for those committed to other seminars to contribute to our on-going work.

After introducing ourselves at table on Thursday afternoon, we had a general orientation to the work of the group for new participants—exploring the ideas and practices that emerge at the intersection of liturgical theology, LGBTQIA+ lives, and queer theory. Then, Bryan Cones discussed his work on reading liturgies closely and comparatively to tease out how they structure gender dynamics in relation to LGBTQIA+ realities. We congratulate Bryan on his earning of the PhD from Melbourne University this past year and look forward to his future projects.

On Friday morning, we focused on Lis Valle-Ruiz’ recent and upcoming liturgical/performative explorations of identity, faith, and sexuality. As her alter-ego, Sophia Divinitrix; High Priestess Unrobed, Lis embodies (and so reveals) how we negotiate varieties of roles imposed by particular cultural contexts while holding on to our particularities of ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality and so forth. She is gearing up for a series of nine services of this type in April; we look forward to hearing of the insights and practices that emerge from these next year. In addition, Dan Schlorff also introduced us to his recent DMin project on confronting toxic masculinity within and without the church. Finally, we discussed the emergence of the new Book of Worship within the United Church of Christ and especially the revision of the ordination rite in which Sue Blain and others are attempting to queer the narrative of Christian religious leadership, by adding names of people from scripture who have not usually been recognized in such rites, such as Junia (Romans 16: 7), and the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8: 21-40).

On Friday afternoon, we explored Melissa Wilcox’ remarkable ethnography, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody, which involved a five-year