I quite like cheese

Grilled cheese. Cheddar with Branston Pickle. Chunks of the stuff. Lovely.

Welcome

A bit about me, then. I'm Chris. I'm a student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. The GTU is a consortium of seminaries and research schools all within Berkeley (except for one). I am affiliated with the Episcopal Church seminary here, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and earned my M.Div. there this past spring.

Personally, I have what might be called progressive or liberal Anglo-Catholic tendencies. I am a member of the Fellowship of St. John, which are the associates of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. I agree in principle with Affirming Anglican Catholicism, and would join except that the US branch seems to be dormant these days. I am a member of St. Paul's, Benicia, which is in the diocese of Northern California.

This year, I am working on a second degree -- an M.A. in Liturgical Studies. The purpose of this blog is largely to organize my thoughts around my thesis topic which seems to change from week to week, but largely has to do with the exploration of a methodology for effective liturgical catechesis. Essentially, the problem looks like this: liturgy works through symbols, people benefit from expanded understanding of the supposed meaning of those symbols, and so we (i.e., "the Church") needs to have a good way of doing that teaching.

I've started from the ritual of footwashing in the Maundy Thursday service. This is an ancient rite, but one that had largely fallen into disuse outside of monasteries and arcane royal ceremonies before its recovery in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950's. As part of the general pattern of liturgical restoration and renewal in the 20th century, it spread to other liturgical churches, and is now practiced in many Episcopalian parishes. I have run into a very wide variety of conflicting and sometimes hostile attitudes to the practice, and I wonder if those attitudes would be different if the practice was explained better. But how to do that?

I am hoping to draw upon research in ethnography in ritual studies as well as research in (Christian) education in an attempt to create a methodology for scoping, planning, and executing effective teaching about elements of the liturgy. I suspect that this will involve the following elements:

1. Clarification of the problem: how do people understand a given liturgical rite or ritual? (Ethnography)
2. Strategy for teaching: how might understanding be improved? (education)
3. Evaluation: how might we test whether we have succeeded? (um... ethnography again)

Obviously, this is too much material for one simple master's thesis of 100 pages. I hope to come up with a general strategic proposal in the thesis, and then perhaps to test it in a doctoral dissertation. Wish me luck!