Worship in Communion with Creation: Recognizing a Broader Participation

In honor of Teresa Berger, we are invited to consider the heights and the depths of worship in communion with creation.

What if at the heart of the created universe lives the worship and praise of the Creator? And what if everything created finds its fulfillment in turning to this Creator God in worship? In a time of environmental crisis, Psalm 148 is a bold reminder that all of creation―heavenly beings, stars and planets, earth’s landforms and water bodies, flora and fauna, humans young and old―have a capacity for worship, to join in praise to and of their Maker.

Written in honor of the prolific liturgical theologian Teresa Berger, the essays included in this collection affirm this biblical witness in studies theological, liturgical, and artistic by offering perspectives and examples from Christian antiquity to the present and by identifying ritual and musical expressions from both the Christian East and West. The contributors also consider the cosmic and the earthly, to recognize the heights and the depths of worship in communion with creation. Berger’s 2025 Berakah Award address to the members of the North American Academy of Liturgy is also included.   

Contributors:

Antonio Eduardo Alonso
Kimberly Hope Belcher
Teresa Berger
Harald Buchinger
Nathan P. Chase
Nina Glibetić
Phoenix Gonzalez
Willie James Jennings
Andrew B. McGowan
Gabriel Radle
Markus Rathey
Mark Roosien 
Melanie C. Ross
Bryan D. Spinks
Benjamin M. Stewart
Kathryn Tanner
Karen Westerfield Tucker

Melanie C. Ross is an associate professor of liturgical studies at Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music, New Haven, Connecticut. Her research examines ecumenical liturgical theology, North American evangelicalism, and the worship of contemporary congregations, which resulted in the publication of Evangelical versus Liturgical? Defying a Dichotomy (Eerdmans, 2014) and Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is the editor of On Earth as in Heaven? Liturgy, Materiality, and Economics (Liturgical Press, 2025).

Karen B. Westerfield Tucker is professor of worship at Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts. A former editor-in-chief of Studia Liturgica (2005–2013), she is the 2023 recipient of the Berakah Award from the North American Academy of Liturgy. She coedited (with Geoffrey Wainwright) The Oxford History of Christian Worship (Oxford University Press, 2006), authored American Methodist Worship (Oxford University Press, 2001), and has published numerous essays in the areas of Methodist/Wesleyan liturgical history and theology, hymnology, and ecumenism.