Essential Workers, Essential Services? Leitourgia in Light of Lockdown

Within days of the outbreak of COVID-19, the language of “essential work” and “essential workers” became commonplace in public discourse. “Church workers” and their in-person liturgical services were largely deemed “non-essential”, and most assemblies shifted worship to online platforms. While some...

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主要作者: Cones, Bryan (Author)
格式: 電子 Article
語言:English
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出版: MDPI [2021]
In: Religions
Year: 2021, 卷: 12, 發布: 2
Further subjects:B Covid-19
B Black Lives Matter
B 抗議
B Public Theology
B Liturgy
B Pandemic
B Eucharist
B Assembly
B Liturgical Theology
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總結:Within days of the outbreak of COVID-19, the language of “essential work” and “essential workers” became commonplace in public discourse. “Church workers” and their in-person liturgical services were largely deemed “non-essential”, and most assemblies shifted worship to online platforms. While some reflection on this virtual “church work” has appeared in the intervening months, there has been less evaluation of the gathered assembly’s absence from the public square, along with the contribution its liturgical work might offer in interpreting the pandemic and its effects. This essay imagines a post-COVID-19 agenda for liturgical studies that focuses on a recovery of Christian liturgy as public, in-person, and “essential” service done for the sake of the polis—a public example of “church doing world”—that proposes a countersign to the inequalities of contemporary consumer culture laid bare in these last months. It begins by engaging in dialogue with the leitourgia of groups who insisted on the essential nature of their public service, in particular the public protests against police violence that marked the summer of 2020. In doing so, it seeks ways liturgical assemblies might better propose a “public theology” of God’s work in the world understood as the concursus Dei, the divine accompanying of creation and humanity within it.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel12020101