Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990665
Marcelitte Failla
After our meeting in an online occult Facebook group, Amanda decided to come by my house to receive a tarot reading. Immediately, upon her entrance to my living room, we began getting to know one another. I introduced her to my six-month-old puppy and offered her coffee. I unwrapped my tarot cards from the gold and brown cloth where they are kept safe and asked Amanda to shuffle them while telling me what was on her mind. We spoke like old friends, sharing the deepest parts of ourselves. Amanda’s body language told me she was sad. Her shoulders hunched. Eyes cast down. She was struggling with depression. The medication that she was previously using was not working and she was scared to begin a new prescription, not knowing its effects. She was finishing college and beginning a path advocating for reproductive justice. Her goal: to become a doula and help other Black women receive quality care during childbirth. Turning to tarot, Amanda asked, “Will it work? Will I overcome this?” In America, “Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.” Helping Amanda through this reading felt important, not just for me, but for us all. This article explores African American women’s shifting tarot from a European-dominated tradition into one that cultivates resilience for Black people. Through a process of creolization, or “Hoodoo sensibility” as one of my respondents termed it, Black women make tarot Black by reimagining the Eurocentric deck into one that reflects brown and Black faces and connecting to ancestors long lost through the transatlantic slave trade. I argue that due to the reinterpretation of tarot within an Africana religious framework—what I’ve termed Black tarot—cultivates moments of resilience for Black women practitioners as a temporary experience of perseverance instead of a static state of being. As such, Black tarot acts as a resource for Black women cultivating this processual resilience by revealing the potentialities surrounding a situation, connecting the querent to her ancestors, and providing suggestions for possible courses of action. Additionally, many of my respondents—like Amanda, above—are actively engaged in social justice work. As such, Black tarot not only impacts individual decisions but has the possibility to transform wider networks through community-based action. I have been reading tarot almost all my life. My mother gave me my first tarot deck when I was twelve years old. She taught me about the suits, the major and minor arcana, and the
{"title":"Black Tarot: African American Women and Divine Processes of Resilience","authors":"Marcelitte Failla","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990665","url":null,"abstract":"After our meeting in an online occult Facebook group, Amanda decided to come by my house to receive a tarot reading. Immediately, upon her entrance to my living room, we began getting to know one another. I introduced her to my six-month-old puppy and offered her coffee. I unwrapped my tarot cards from the gold and brown cloth where they are kept safe and asked Amanda to shuffle them while telling me what was on her mind. We spoke like old friends, sharing the deepest parts of ourselves. Amanda’s body language told me she was sad. Her shoulders hunched. Eyes cast down. She was struggling with depression. The medication that she was previously using was not working and she was scared to begin a new prescription, not knowing its effects. She was finishing college and beginning a path advocating for reproductive justice. Her goal: to become a doula and help other Black women receive quality care during childbirth. Turning to tarot, Amanda asked, “Will it work? Will I overcome this?” In America, “Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.” Helping Amanda through this reading felt important, not just for me, but for us all. This article explores African American women’s shifting tarot from a European-dominated tradition into one that cultivates resilience for Black people. Through a process of creolization, or “Hoodoo sensibility” as one of my respondents termed it, Black women make tarot Black by reimagining the Eurocentric deck into one that reflects brown and Black faces and connecting to ancestors long lost through the transatlantic slave trade. I argue that due to the reinterpretation of tarot within an Africana religious framework—what I’ve termed Black tarot—cultivates moments of resilience for Black women practitioners as a temporary experience of perseverance instead of a static state of being. As such, Black tarot acts as a resource for Black women cultivating this processual resilience by revealing the potentialities surrounding a situation, connecting the querent to her ancestors, and providing suggestions for possible courses of action. Additionally, many of my respondents—like Amanda, above—are actively engaged in social justice work. As such, Black tarot not only impacts individual decisions but has the possibility to transform wider networks through community-based action. I have been reading tarot almost all my life. My mother gave me my first tarot deck when I was twelve years old. She taught me about the suits, the major and minor arcana, and the","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":"36 1","pages":"41 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42896247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990664
Rachel Wheeler
Liturgical celebrations in Christian communities often feature a meal of thanksgiving: the Eucharist. This meal commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus and his friends (Luke 22:14–20) and invites members of the faith community into a life of shared ministry. That this happens through the sharing of food is significant because food is an essential feature of our lives—food forms and transforms us. That personal and communal formation and transformation are effected through such a ubiquitous agent in our lives as food can, however, become problematic when food’s very ubiquity renders it dismissed from serious consideration. Indeed, in my own North American context where for many people food is easily procured, food can just as easily be taken for granted. To retrieve a sense of gratitude for—and celebration of—our everyday meals and the vital role they play in our lives requires that we be intentional about our relationship with food. This essay explores the farm-to-table (or farm-to-fork) movement and related food procurement principles and practices as means of restoring relationships—of forming and transforming ourselves as beings in relationship. I suggest that reconfiguration of the ways we procure food might be understood as transformative praxis. Reconfiguration may even become transformative liturgical praxis when we evoke the image of an expansive table that extends the sacred (associated with our liturgical meals) to the meals we regularly eat alone or with others in household settings. The term expansive table also means to connect our activities of providing foods at our household tables with the task of making sure everyone has room at the table, including access to food cared for or grown and procured within just conditions. The farm-to-table movement aims to render transparent the process of growing and making food and to draw producers and consumers into closer relationship. This movement invites people of faith to attend to the impacts their food choices have, expansively, on tables beyond their own and to redress the dis-connecting that thoughtless consumption effects. In this essay, I begin with a statement of the problem of contemporary experiences of alienation, recognizing that my context is one in which food is typically plentiful and more easily procured than elsewhere in the world. Many consumers sharing this context nevertheless experience alienation from the foods they consume and from Earth that provides the food. I then suggest a renewal of our relationship with food through engaging food production and procurement practices, food preparation and consumption practices, and finally food disposal practices. Through these movements I patch together reflections by people of faith for whom food procurement and preparation activities have become, in a vital sense, transformative liturgical praxis because these activities function to restore relationships of intimacy with one’s own embodied self, other members of Earth’s communi
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990667
Benjamin Durheim
In recent years, tabletop role-playing games have surged in popularity. The reasons for this may vary, but a central feature of what tends to make tabletop role-playing games compelling for many players is the ability the games afford to connect with a character, party, or storyline in a way that moves significantly beyond participation as an observer or consumer of content. Creative agency is involved—sometimes significantly so—on the part of the players, the narrator/ game facilitator, and the group as a whole. The experience itself becomes crafted beyond the simple adding-up of story, game mechanics, and player participation. The fantasy worlds that the participants inhabit become something more than simulation; they often symbolize aspects of players’ lives. By this I do not mean that they exhibit some surface-level one-to-one representation of things or concepts that echo the realities from which participants come. I mean instead that the work of symbolization—of mediation of meaning, presence, and identity—can take place in the context of the game by a multitude of ways that vacillate in both intensity and relevance depending upon the game’s context, the context of the group playing it, and the contexts that individual participants bring to it. The symbolization that unfolds in a tabletop role-playing game is in some significant respects quite similar to symbolism at play in liturgical celebration (in kind if not in content). The central aim of this discussion, after briefly explaining what I mean by symbol and symbolization, is to unpack two main ways that tabletop role-playing games symbolize reality: in the communal experience of revelation, and in the practice of forming and reforming (and, often enough, malforming) approaches to ethics. Following this, I will conclude by arguing that liturgy itself can learn from these tendencies of tabletop role-playing games, most especially in the richness that necessarily depends upon a certain level of letting-go or stepping away from attempting to control the ritual, its particular contents, and its results. A word of clarification (or perhaps caution) before continuing: I do not mean to maintain that tabletop role-playing games are liturgies, nor that they are liturgical in all the ways that Christian rituals are liturgical. Indeed, role-playing games have known a significant amount of suspicion (and even “moral panic”) specifically from religious communities, and while this is no longer as potent, it is also not completely absent. In this light I wish to tread carefully and keep my claims modest; tabletop role-playing games may be thought of as pseudo-liturgical in particular ways that are illustrative for liturgy itself (e.g., symbolizing reality, being predicated upon a communal experience of revelation, forging and clarifying approaches to ethics). This is where my claims stop.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2021.1990646
M. Minister
Friday (technically a Thursday): The story of how I came to see raving as a religious practice begins not on a dancefloor but in a hospital bed, about to undergo anesthesia for a colonoscopy. As I went under, I told the gastroenterologist that I thought it was parasites, but the tests for parasites came back negative. He replied, “The drugs for parasites are nasty. You don’t want those.” It was clear he thought this procedure was unnecessary. I don’t remember replying then, but there are still occasions when I find myself talking back to him in my head. The tumor in my colon was so big that the scope couldn’t get through. Afterward, I sat in that same doctor’s office listening to him say, “I have never diagnosed anyone so young.” He scheduled a CT scan for the following day, Friday, which showed more tumors in my liver. At age thirty-three, I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer and descended into a kind of hell.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1990654
Jason M. Smith
In what follows, I want to treat two thinkers who will help us think through two distinct ways in which sport—either participating in sport as a player or following sport as a fan—might be construed as “liturgy.” The first is theorist of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, who will help us to think of sport as a kind of ritual rationalization of a deeply broken world. Indeed, Smith will show how the patterned-behavior that accompanies something like sport as liturgy functions to bring an unendurable world of chaos under control, though it is a feinted and false sense of control that ought not to be the goal of any genuine liturgy. The second thinker will be Lincoln Harvey, who I take to be the most significant among those who attempt to articulate a “theology of sport.” For Harvey, sport is the “liturgical celebration of our contingency.” Sport is absolutely a kind of liturgy, but what it celebrates is not God per se but rather the beautiful contingency of an unnecessary creation. We do not wish the world away or wish it to be anything other than it is. Sport, instead, is our liturgical celebration of our contingent being. I shall find these perspectives on sport as liturgy unsatisfying, but not entirely false. Indeed, I shall recommend ultimately that Christians take up something like Harvey’s position as a corrective to the natural inertia toward escapism that the ritual of sport often imposes upon those of us who follow them. Yet, I will level a significant theological objection against Harvey’s account of sport— namely, that he pushes his account of sport as contingent slightly too far by insisting that sport is unique among human activity as entirely immune from God’s providence. I take that assertion to be false, but I do not find it so fundamental to Harvey’s argument as to scuttle his account of sport as liturgy entirely. Thus, I present in the final section a brief modification of Harvey on the unique sort of liturgy that sport ought to be—a liturgical celebration of all that is not God.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2021.1990644
D. Turnbloom
This issue of Liturgy borrows its title from a course taught by religion professor, M. Cooper Minister. In this course, Minister invites students to consider everyday rituals and practices that might not normally be recognized as acts of religion. When imagining religious activity, many Christians will think of prayers and rituals that are overtly theistic and come from the rich traditions of Christian communities. However, liturgical scholars have long pointed out that the liturgical practices of Christianity are rooted in the materials and activities of mundane life. While lacking overt theism in their material makeup, practices and rituals that comprise the everyday lives of people exert profound influence over the world-view and values of those who embody them. In her book Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, sociologist of religion, Meredith McGuire, asks about the study of religion.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2021.1990645
Taylor W. Burton-Edwards
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1951085
Stephanie Perdew
On Maundy Thursday 2021, I tasted the bread and cup of holy communion along with my congregants, for the first time since the First Sunday in Lent 2020. That was the day my local congregation of the United Church of Christ (UCC) last celebrated the sacrament of holy communion as the coronavirus was spreading across the globe and gaining a foothold in the United States. Beginning on the Third Sunday in Lent 2020, we responded to our governor’s mandate to shelter in place and closed our sanctuary doors. As we did so, we also decided that we would not celebrate holy communion in a virtual context. Even though we had the technological means to do so, our theological decision was not to celebrate holy communion in virtual space. This article is a pastoral and theological reflection on how one Protestant congregation in the Reformed tradition made the decision to enter a pandemic time of eucharistic fasting instead of celebrating communion online, and what the congregation and I as their pastor experienced spiritually during that time. It is not meant to suggest that all congregations should have made this choice, but it does offer insight into how it was discerned and why. This reflection offers a timeline of the decision-making and ensuing theological conversations and is undertaken with reference to several different denominational statements about the celebration of online communion. It refers as well to theological discussion during the time of pandemic in social media forums, on blogs, and in articles published in this journal. Finally, it raises further questions for reflection for those Protestants who did celebrate holy communion online during pandemic and for those who did not. In this journal we appreciate the connections between the parish and the academy, and the conversations between and among pastoral practitioners (practical theologians)—those writing from the academy, and those writing in the blogosphere. What pastors may be realizing after a year of pastoring in the pandemic in real time needs to be shared with those whose work it is to guide our theological reflection from the denominational offices and the academy. This is part of the work of reflective practice, and an inclusion of voices not always heard in theological conversation that is supposed to be about the local church.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2021.1951083
David Bjorlin
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