Teresa Berger, Author at PrayTellBlog

Teresa Berger is a Professor of Liturgical Studies and Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology at Yale. She is the editor, most recently, of Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (Liturgical Press, 2019), and author of @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2018). She has also written extensively on liturgy and gender.

Holy Water — Contactless

August 16, 2021 Teresa Berger Devotions and Sacramentals

I have really, really missed the regular availability of holy water. I was therefore glad – as well as somewhat bemused — to find a COVID-attentive holy water dispenser when I went to Mass earlier today, in a Gothic Cathedral no less.

The Annunciation of the Lord: And Became Water?

March 23, 2021 Teresa Berger Liturgical Spirituality Liturgical year

But even more than God becoming human and 78% H2O as a newborn, the Incarnation is also about God becoming cosmic dust, and about God becoming genetic kin to all that is, since humans share with all that exists on planet earth a common genetic ancestry.

March 3, 2021: Celebrating 1,700 Years of Sundays “Off”

February 25, 2021 Teresa Berger Liturgical Spirituality

Sunday for us must be more than a private, leisure-filled, home-spa kind of day. Rather, the holy day of Sunday really is about a radical de-centering of the self, for the sake of re-centering ourselves on the One who alone is Holy

Ash Wednesday: Remember You Are Stardust

February 12, 2021 Teresa Berger Liturgical Spirituality

If remembering the end of our life is one part of these words, contemplating its beginning is the other; we return to what we have always been, so Genesis claims, namely dust. Stardust, actually…

Anna, the Prophet, and Her “Censored Pulpit”

January 29, 2021 Teresa Berger Saints / Mary

Depictions of Anna in Christian visual art have made up for some of this censoring over the centuries, by letting Anna speak through hand gestures, or by giving her a message to proclaim via words written on a scroll she is holding.

A Queen at the Christmas Crèche

December 30, 2020 Teresa Berger Inculturation

At the end of this year of racial reckoning, with far too many images of black bodies killed, there was something moving in seeing the Queen of Sheba — an African woman, tall and proud — walk toward the Christ child bringing her extravagant gifts.

A “Madonna amidst the Ruins,” the COVID-year 2020 included

December 20, 2020 Teresa Berger Saints / Mary

For survivors of the bombings of the city and of World War II more generally, this Mary seemed to hold a message: She was in their midst, one of them, a survivor of unimaginable horror, and still cradling badly damaged life. Divine life.

Creation, Day Seven: For God and Creation, a Day of Rest

September 26, 2020 Teresa Berger Environment and Ecology

What we need to live into, not least in this time of ecological emergency, is the reality of a larger, universal, planetary communion: by reason of our createdness, we are kin with everything that is created. Maybe keeping Sabbath is one way to begin to live into this vision.