"Whose Bodies? What Technologies? Cocreating Access as Christian Worship"

The COVID-19 pandemic gave urgency to the use of technologies in worship and transformed practices of worship in some Christian communities, providing access for many and creating barriers to access for others. How can Christian communities navigate these technological possibilities faithfully? This lecture makes the case that an answer must begin, not end, with access. This requires articulating both a theology of access and a theology of worship that centers access as vital for worshipping communities who take seriously God’s desire for Christians to worship God together. With this foundation, it becomes possible to investigate how technology in worship facilitates understanding and attending to human bodies and communities. But it also asks us to think expansively about what constitutes technologies of access and what conditions make worshipping together possible.

Dr. Spurrier will be at Louisville Seminary to deliver the lecture in person with an option for remote participants to join virtually. Registration is required whether attending in-person or online.

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About Dr. Rebecca Spurrier

Dr. Rebecca F. Spurrier is Associate Dean for Worship Life and Assistant Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary. She integrates a focus on disability studies and liturgical theology in the classroom with the formation of worship leaders through weekly chapel services. She is interested in a theology and practice of public worship that reflects the beauty and tension human difference brings to Christian liturgy. Engaging ethnographic theology, disability studies, and liturgical aesthetics, her research explores the hope of human interdependence and the importance of liturgical access for religious practice and Christian community. She is the author of The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship (Fordham University Press, 2019) and other chapters and articles on worship, disability theology, and ethnographic theology, such as “Disability, Human Difference, and the Sacramentality of Access,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Sacraments and Sacramentality and “Disabling Eschatology: Time for the Table of Our Common Pleasure,” in the journal Liturgy.

About the Caldwell Lecture

The Caldwell Lectures honor former Louisville Seminary President Frank H. Caldwell who served from 1930 to 1964. Dr. Caldwell was Professor of Homiletics during his time at the seminary in addition to serving as President from 1936–1964. He also served as the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1966 after retiring from the seminary. In addition to the Caldwell Lectures a professorship in homiletics has been endowed in his name at the seminary. View prior lectures here.

Whose Bodies? What Technologies? Cocreating Access as Christian Worship

2023 Caldwell Lecture presented by Dr. Rebecca F. Spurrier