2020 Catholic Press Association honorable mention award for faith and science

This collection of essays explores the rich and diverse intersections between the world of liturgy and the worlds of creation and the cosmos. The intersections highlighted here include biblical, historical, visual, and musical materials as well as contemporary theological and pastoral challenges for worship today. The essays gathered in this volume were first presented at the 2018 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference and are here made available to a wider audience. These essays are responses to the unprecedented attention to ecological and cosmological concerns, which call for sustained engagement by scholars and practitioners of liturgy.

"With world-class liturgical scholars offering creative, tradition-steeped essays on the ecological imaginaries made and possible in practices of worship, this is a milestone volume."Willis Jenkins, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
"Once again, the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale and Liturgical Press have provided us with a rich ecumenical collection of essays drawn from an important colloquium, this one about the manifold ways Christian liturgy locates us on our wounded planet and shapes our understanding of the cosmos. Many of the essays here will become classics, worthy of repeated reference—those on Daniel 3, on bread, on Laudato Sií, on environmental care in Eastern Orthodoxy, and on `dust wisdom,' among many other examples. But the magisterial introduction by Teresa Berger, outlining the roots and the sweep of this urgent topic, is itself an important reason to read the book."Gordon W. Lathrop, Author of Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology, Past-President, Societas Liturgica
"Berger’s introduction is masterful in situating the conference theme within the growing interdisciplinary ecclesial concern for the environment. Her editing is rigorous, with each essay well footnoted, and the book concludes with a subject index that includes biblical references. Recommended to seminary libraries.”
Catholic Library World
"The essays comprising this book provide rich fare for all who see environmental degradation as an issue for faith, theology, and worship.”
Worship
"Teresa Berger's editorial achievement in so skillfully arranging the collection is a work of creation in its own right. Especially in the context of covid-19, when touch, contact, materiality, relationships with our environment and worship itself have been radically disrupted, these timely essays provide rich subject matter for new and important conversations."
Modern Believing
"This coherent collection will be of interest to liturgical historians, clergy, theologians and musicians seeking historical, theological, and practical resources to develop liturgies that help Christians become aware of the theological grounding for their role in relating to and caring for the natural world."
Religious Studies Review

Teresa Berger is professor of liturgical studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School where she also holds an appointment as the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology. She is the author, most recently, of @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2018) and editor or co-editor of three previous volumes from the Yale ISM Liturgy Conferences from Liturgical Press.