Weed and Feed: Congregational Crabgrass and Liturgical Formation

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Notes

1 Lawrence Hoffman, “How Ritual Means: Ritual Circumcision in Rabbinic Culture and Today,” Studia Liturgica 23, no. 1 (1993): 78.

2 For example, see Debra Dean-Murphy, Teaching That Transforms: Worship as the Heart of Christian Education (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004); E. Byron Anderson, Worship and Christian Identity: Practicing Ourselves (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003); and James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013).

3 I spent a sabbatical studying this congregation (Spring 2017) and its unexpected growth and diversity in light of its fairly traditional approach to liturgy and ministry. I had a chance to survey and interview a number of congregants which revealed these explanations.

4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipous, vol. 1, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and A Thousand Plateaus, vol. 2, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

5 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22 and 25.

6 Todd E. Johnson, “The Anatomy of Theologica Prima,” Proceedings of the North American Academy of Liturgy (2019): 69–83.

7 Jean Piaget, Biology and Knowledge: An Essay on the Relations between Organic Regulations and Cognitive Processes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 214-369 passim.

8 Piaget, 145.

9 Piaget, 164.

10 Piaget, 171.

11 Piaget, 177–81.

12 Piaget, 191.

13 Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson, “The Enactive Approach,” in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed. Lawrence Shapiro (London: Routledge, 2014), 207.

14 Ken Aizawa, “Extended Cognition,” in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed. Lawrence Shapiro (London: Routledge, 2014), 95–114. See also Brad D. Strawn and Warren S. Brown, Enhancing Christian Life: How Extended Cognition Augments Religious Community (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020).

15 Carly Kontra, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Sian L. Beilock, “Embodied Learning Across the Life Span,” Topics in Cognitive Science 4, no. 4 (2012): 731–39. An illustration of this came from a participant in a symposium on seminary chapels who shared that surveys of their seminary’s alums indicated that they were more likely to follow what they experienced in chapel than what they were taught in worship class in their ministries after graduation.

16 Claudia Scorolli, “Embodiment and Language,” in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed. Lawrence Shapiro (London: Routledge, 2014), 332.

17 Scorolli, 332–63 passim. Physiologically, we have learned how context functions within the brain. Language is analogical and metaphorical, and these metaphors become the categories through which we appraise our condition in any particular moment. Complex metaphors arise from primary metaphors that are directly grounded in our everyday experiences. Complex metaphors are created within the brain in neural clusters (i.e., visual, topographic, somatic metaphors, etc.) which are connected to those areas in the brain that deal with those areas experientially. We make associative connections with space that shape our learning. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), 255.

18 For a study on embodied practices and their impact on formation and learning, see Todd E. Johnson, “A Body of Evidence,” Spiritus 18, no. 2 (Fall 2018) 231–45. Some of the research in this paper was drawn from this essay.

19 Murray Shanahan, Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), 48.

20 For a good starting place in the current state of the question on socialization within sociology, see Grit Höppner, “Rethinking Socialization Research through the Lens of New Materialism,” Frontiers in Sociology 2 (2017), https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00013

21 Gabriele Sofia, “Towards an Embodied Theatrology?,” in Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Jacono (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), 52–53.

22 Sofia, 58.

23 Francisco Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 340.

24 A good entry point for exploring this field is Charles S. Suchr, Social Deviance: Perspectives and Prospects (New York: Holt, Rineholt and Winston, 1978); see also this distillation of the major thinkers and theories: https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/12686_DevianceSocialControl.pdf.

25 Hoffman, 78–93 (see n. 1).

26 See Ronald Grimes, Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in its Practice, Essays on its Theory (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1990), 44; see also Hoffman, 82 (see n. 1).

27 It should be noted that some communities are so large that they “boutique” their worship according to style, allowing people to find the service with an acceptable range that best matches their liturgical comfort level.

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Notes on contributors

Todd E. Johnson

Todd E. Johnson, the current vice-president of The Liturgical Conference which publishes Liturgy, holds the Brehm Chair in Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary.