Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics1

Christian Batalden Scharen

Introduction A Christian social ethicist's starting point should be the ordinary language of Christian men and women as they discuss what they should do. Not what they should do in general, or in ideal circumstances, or in some future time and distant place; but what they should do here and now in response to the varied demands and temptations and opportunities confronting them. Ralph Potter, "The Logic of Moral Argument" Following Ralph Potter's call for Christian social ethics to attend to the "the ordinary language of Christian men and women as they discuss what they should do," this article argues for a grounded approach to the debates over worship and ethics.2 Over the last twenty years, these debates have remained abstract, either restating the importance of connecting worship and ethics or developing theories of their connection.3 By means of an extended description of the ufe of one congregation, the Catholic Shrine of the Immaculate Conception located in Atlanta's center-city, I show that careful case study can press academic debates toward more nuanced understandings of the way everyday Christian communities worship and work in the world. Yet the article moves beyond arguing for a grounded approach to the debates over worship and ethics. I also use my findings in order to "test" theological ethical theory regarding the relation of worship and ethics, specifically in the vein of character ethics as Don Saliers and Stanley Hauerwas have developed it. At its most basic, they claim that participation in worship forms or should form the character of Christians whose subsequent actions unfold a Christian witness in the
Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 20 (2000): 275-305

276 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics world. Their work, while suggestive, does not offer a satisfactory answer to the question o how participation in the liturgy changes the Christian as moral agent in more or less significant ways. I argue that deeper understanding of the relation between liturgy and ethics requires attention not primarily to liturgy or ethics but particular congregations. In the particularity of a congregation gathering for worship, members "authorize" liturgy to be powerful in relation to the community's witness in the world.4 In comparison to traditional accounts that look primarily at liturgy's formative power, attending to a particular gathered community requires recognizing that the members live much of their lives outside the church and its liturgy. Thus, they experience the formative influence of multiple competing goods grounded in ideals embodied in various institutions (such as education, work, family) and socio-cultural factors (urban restructuring, individualism, race, class). The powerful influences of these institutions and socio-cultural factors are carried in the community itself and thus are the very means by which the community comes to its understanding of itself, its worship, and its work in the world. Traditional church-world distinctions strain and groan in an effort to account for the ways these various influences both permit and limit varieties of Christian witness. My procedure will be the following: after an opening vignette introducing the Shrine, I will offer a brief rendition of the way character ethics has approached the question of worship and ethics, along with the rationale for "testing" this conceptual approach in actual communities of faith. Then, I will describe aspects of the Shrine's communal identity, liturgical life, and ethical commitments in such a way that, in conclusion, I am able to demonstrate the importance of the community for understanding the power of liturgical and other influences on Christian witness and work in the world. An Opening Vignette5 One morning I went down to the Shrine for the second of a two-part adult education event on the death penalty. There were about fourteen people gathered around in a circle at the west end of the parish hall. Andy led the session on behalf of the Life Issues Committee. He passed out some materials and announced the plan for the session. Since the first session introduced participants to the broader issues surrounding death penalty debates, today he intended to personalize those debates by sharing the voices and stories of death row inmates. The first fifteen minutes of his presentation were almost impossible to hear because of the racket that Lois was making on the other end of the parish hall. A mentally ill homeless woman who has adopted the Shrine, Lois was coughing and talking loudly with two of her homeless friends. Andy later laughed and said, "Lois offered a competing session."6 Lois had her trademark outfit ona coat with two bags slung over her shoulders so that their long straps produce a grand

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 277 "X" across her back andfront.She had short hair and a small wrinkled face, no teeth, and a gleam in her eye warning others that she was capable of more than they might believe on first glance. Lois and her friends were drinking coffee around one of the rectangular tables. Scattered nearby on the floor lay over-stuffed grocery bags. The parish halla full-sized basement with a kitchen, a great room, and bathroomsdoubles as a soup kitchen every Saturday and as a nightly shelter for the homeless from October through the end of March. Many who spend the night also come Sunday morning for hot coffee and a roll. As one member remarked, "If we welcome [the homeless] on other days, then we have to welcome them on Sunday."7 After the death penalty discussion was over, I went upstairs for Mass. I was near the end of my four-month research period at the Shrine and so rather than attending to the whole of Sunday liturgy, I had now tuned my attention to the impromptu mini-dramas that occur alongside the official performance of the liturgy. Thefirstthing to strike me that morning occurred in the second half of the servicea section titled "the liturgy of the Eucharist." Just after the procession with the offering and the wine and bread for communion, Fr. David8 took the censor from the altar server, filled it with incense, and swung it gently forward and backward over the bread and wine. As the smoke rose upwards toward the sunlightfilteringthrough the stained glass image of the Virgin Mary, he walked all the way around the altar repeating the gentle back and forth motion. Finally, he moved down into the congregation repeating the same action. Lois was sitting in the third pew on the left side of the main aisle. She had seemed distracted and was looking down at one of her grocery bags. Yet, when Fr. David moved toward the congregation, Lois was thefirstto stand up (therituallycorrect action), turning to face him. She stood slightly bent forward with her face outstretched as if straining to see something far off. She has no teeth, which gives her face a scowling look, but it is not beyond her to smile and laugh when something strikes her as pleasant. When Fr. David passed her with the censor, she gracefully bent a bit further forward and made the sign of the cross over herself. Just a few minutes later during the communion, the congregation was singing a favorite hymn, David Haas's lovely 'Table Song," with its chorus "we are the body of Christ; broken and poured out, promise of life from death; we are the body of Christ." Serving communion always begins with the last rows in the back and moves forward. Lois, sitting near thefront,was pacing up and down her pew, singing a rather off-key version of the hymn at the top of her lungs. As I moved out into the main aisle to go down for communion, Betti, a member of the Outreach Committee and head of Atlanta's Catholic Charities organization, moved outfromher pew and walked down the aisle just infrontof me, singing the hymn, beaming with delight as she looked at Lois. During my interview with Betti, she used the example of Lois to speak about what kind of parish the Shrine is. At the Shrine, Betti said, "there is no pretense. There's no folks 'pretending' when everyone knows you. It's a flexible enough group of people so that, I mean,

278 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics like Lois can come in there and act out and it's okay for Lois to be in there and acting out. I mean, you get slightly annoyed, but it's Lois. Lois is part of the congregation."9 Nearly everyone I talked to at the Shrine mentioned Lois. The pastor, Fr. John, and Brad, a Pastoral Council member, worked with her in an effort to understand her situation, history, and possibilities of helping her to a life beyond the street. Others simply know her from her faithful presence in Mass weekdays at 12:10 or Sunday mornings as she rarely misses a service. Her complicated presence in the life of the parish symbolizes two central and interdependent aspects of the Shrine. From one angle, Lois symbolizes the true Pauline "body of Chrisf ' (1 Corinthians 12)a community based on diversity and a difficult but cherished openness brought about by, in the words of Fr. John, "a dependence on God's transforming power and not on worldly divisions."10 Lois, members remind themselves, shares a common baptism and Eucharistie meal with all gathered and thus is central to the living body of Christ. She accordingly receives equal claim to basic human dignity as a beloved child of God. From another angle, Lois symbolizes the biblical "least of these" which Jesus speaks of in Matthew 25. By her presence she plays a priestly role, acting as an icon of Jesus by bringing to the center of the community a gut-level awareness of those many hungry and homeless in the downtown area, in the Shrine's sister parish in Haiti, and around the world, all of whom depend on the material and spiritual support of the Shrine and other congregations like it. Yet exactly because of her regular tirades and episodes before, during, and after mass, it is difficult to romanticize the work of social justice. As one member commented, "well, [Lois is] one of God's creatures, too, but when she really gets cursing, you've got to take her out and get her some help."11 A diverse community brought together and "made" one body; one body turned toward participation in God's work in the world. These two aspects symbolized in Lois's presence meaningfully ground the parish's 150th anniversary slogan, "People Living Church." With a "taste" of life at the Shrine as an enticement for things to come, I will turn now to engage the theological and ethical debates regarding liturgy's supposed power to form Christian people and faithful communities. Liturgy and Ethics: Characterizing a Debate 12 James Gustafson began as early as the mid-1960s to recover the tradition of virtue or character ethics aimed at more carefully specifying how "the church has a function in the formation of the person."13 Rooted in his reading of Aquinas and in his work with his mentor H. Richard Niebuhr's development of an agentcentered ethic around the metaphor of "responsibility," Gustafson's work was a critique of then-dominant ethical approaches too concerned with the context or underlying principles of ethical action.14 He felt that for the sake of the integrity of

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 279 the church, Christian ethics should take better account of "what forms the self." His concern, in part, stemmed from the fact that "the more cultural pluralism is involved in forming selves, the more important it is for communities to see how their particular loyalties and values enter into the shaping of persons who are rightly conditioned by other loyalties and commitments."15 Gustafson directly connected this concern for Christian formation to the issue of worship and spiritual practices that inculcate certain sensesdependence, gratitude, repentancethat give shape to the moral life. He suggested that because of its role in forming these senses, "worship and meditative prayer are fundamental requisites of the Christian moral life."16 Gustafson's early work on character ethics lies behind the current influence of this ethical approach in Christian ethics generally and in the discussion regarding liturgy and ethics. I will focus my discussion of character, liturgy, and ethics by taking up the work of Don E. Saliers and Stanley Hauerwas, two students of Niebuhr and Gustafson who have become central to further developments on the question of liturgy and ethics. Saliers's work on this question began as a rejection of 1960s sociological critics who argued the church was ethically bankrupt because its powerful rhetoric gave way to a culturally captive middle-class morality.17 In his classic article, "Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings," Saliers attempted to shift the conversation from external and causal evaluations of the relation between liturgy and ethics to a view holding that, properly seen, the pairing entails an intrinsic and conceptual connection. In short, Saliers argued that "certain affections and virtues are formed and expressed in the modalities of communal prayer and ritual action. These modalities of prayer enter into the formation of the self in community."18 Drawing on the work of Gustafson and Hauerwas, among others, Saliers outlines an approach to the question of liturgy's relation to ethics. First, Saliers claims, "to worship is to find one's existence oriented in attitudes, beliefs, and intentions" (173). What one believes to be true has effects on one's actions. To confess loyaltythat is to say, Saliers argues, to worshipboth forms and expresses the person's or community's orientation to the world (174). Here and elsewhere, although he does not state it, Saliers's argument suggests certain modes of investigation conducive for my work of "testing" his claims in actual congregations. To test the claim that worship orients action, one would need to study the embodied and linguistic practices of ritual performance as insight into the character of the loyalty expressed, and also attend to the type of ethical orientation expressed and its directions in embodied actions in daily life. What form does worship's orienting effects take? Many forms, Sahers answers, because although worship is normative in its orienting power, "not all who participate in its language and action are shaped by it. . . . Not all who say the words and participate in the stylized activities fully understand what it is to say and do these things and to mean them" (176).

280 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics Second, one's moral orientation and its directions in daily action arise, Saliers argues, from "available mythoistories and narratives of human existence in which a picture of the moral good and associated ideas are expressed" (175). But, I would argue, certainly these Christian mythoi differ according to interpretative communities, including the questions of whose interpretation and for whom within and among communities. Further, other institutional ideals and practices, along with their narrative traditions, always already shape a community of faith through its members' participation in the world. For example, the values of "liberal individualism" pervade American culture. The mass media is driven by a utilitarian individualist market-based calculus, but its public face more often disseminates a heart-warming, expressive personalism.19 Attempts to understand the formative power of Christian narratives on moral action must account for the formative power of these other "secular" traditions. This is so, in part, because Christians living in a pluralistic society do some things together and do many other things with other configurations of people according to other institutionally patterned ideals, practices, rules, and regulations.20 Third, when Christian people engage in liturgical activities they are, according to Saliers, "doing something, performing an act" (176). The moral orientation one inhabits consists of an embodiment of the narratives in which one has lived one's life (or which have lived in and through one). This insight has received much elaboration by recent interpreters of ritual life and the body.21 These insights call me to pay attention to the nature of bodily inculturation, to kinesiology and physiology, to habits and bodily mastery of skills, and to the passions and dispositions and affections that are central to the power of cultural mythoi and ritual actions to shape human beings in certain ways, with certain effects. Here, Saliers's analogy to saying "I love you" makes the point. The words themselves and the grammatical structure are not the core of the social meaning, Saliers argues, but rather the bodily effect or enactment of the saying, a saying that carries present emotional weight of a particular sort and also the historical weight of previous actions of devotion. The three words "I love you" in that order may hypothetically be said to mean many things but only a grounded "thick description" (Geertz) of the context and bodily action of the speech will illuminate the intention and meaning of the words as well as their reception and effect. Saliers's article, despite its formal and abstract level of analysis, drives toward empirical work and provides concrete direction for learning about worship and ethics from actual people in churches. In his conclusion, Saliers notes "what remains to be done is the detailed analysis and specification of how the context of the liturgyrightly prayed and celebratedis the school of the affections; and more particularly what constitutes faithful and unfaithful liturgy in the formation of Christian life" (187). In order to "test" such claims about the internal and conceptual relation between worship, the formation of character and ethical life, and the influence of other cultural traditions and social institutions, one needs to,

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 281 as Ralph Potter suggests, "look to the ordinary language of Christian men and women." By "testing" here I do not mean to imply a utilitarian understanding of worship. As Saliers argues, worship ascribes glory to God alone; but unless the glorification is shown in works of justice, mercy, and love faithful to God's commands, Christ's liturgy is not fully enacted. At times the tension between cultic and ethical activity must be rediscovered. At other times, their coinherence and mutual reciprocity must show forth. The glory and holiness of God is shown both in the otherness of God as the object of prayer and worship and in the servanthood of those who are formed in the central symbol of the faith" (181; emphasis in the original). The issue is not "reducing" worship to its social and ethical effects; rather, given the claims made about the formative power of liturgy and the inherent ethical character of the life of Christian discipleship, Christian worship logically entails social and ethical effects. Such a claim, if true, is open to "testing" by careful observation of actual communities of faith, their worship, and their work in the world. Calls for this type of empirical investigation began immediately after Saliers's initial presentation. Margaret Farley, who responded to Saliers's paper when it was originally given, suggested such a testing of claims. Reflecting on her experience in the Roman Catholic church, Farley commented that many Christians find the liturgy today "deadening, not enlivening; impoverishing, not enriching." She asked, "after years of efforts at liturgical renewal, how is it that we do not everywhere know new life?" She suggested that the problem with the liturgy is communitya failure among Christians to agree on a just service to the world, and a resulting breakdown of common symbols needed for a powerfully orienting liturgy. She pointed out the need "to specify how the Christian as moral agent may be changed in ways more or less powerful, more or less truthful." In addition, she suggested that the answer may be in understanding the relation between community, liturgy and ethics.22 While empirical "testing" of claims about the intrinsic connection between liturgy and ethics still awaits serious attention in Christian ethics and moral theology, theologian Stanley Hauerwas has increasingly turned to an empirical, descriptive approach to the topic.23 Hauerwas's views deserve more careful elaboration than I have space for here; however, focused attention to material that bears on the issues at hand will serve my purposes. What strikes me most about Hauerwas's developing position is that the logic of his practical theological aim "to foment a modest revolution by forcing Christians to take themselves seriously as Christians"presses him further and further toward grounding his claims for the formative power of worship in the lives of actual congregations.24

282 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics Hauerwas's understanding of the church offers one angle for examining his view of how liturgy and ethics are related. First, he argues, the framing of the question is wrong. Liturgy is ethics; Christian ethics has no substance apart from its participation in a "storied" communitya community where "the story is not merely told but embodied in a people's habits that form and are formed in worship, governance, and morality."25 This claim grounds his well-worn aphorism that "the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic."26 The church's first task is to Uve the truth of its identity in God through Christ, thus helping the world to know it is the world.27 Such a community is "God's gesture on behalf of the world to create a space and time in which we might have a foretaste of the Kingdom."28 Worship and the things that constitute it, such as prayer, preaching, baptism, and Eucharist, among others, fold Christians into God's life as Christ's body. By one's participation in the body of Christ, one's life includes baptism and Eucharist, but also "immersion in the daily practices of the Christian church: prayer, worship, admonition, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, etc. By these we are transformed over time to participate in God's life. So we become full members in a city ordered to peace."29 This participation in the body is a political reality produced and maintained through sacraments as political rituals. Therefore, the "liturgy is not a motive for social action, it is not a cause to effect. Liturgy is social action."30 Such views have contributed to the tendency of critics, including Hauerwas's teacher James Gustafson, to label him a "sectarian" especially in the sense of abdication of responsibility for participation in the difficult and complex public moral issues of today. Gustafson believes that Hauerwas's focus on explicit Christian language limits the ability of concerned Christians to be intelligible in public. He also charges that Hauerwas's position is untenable given that the church is only one of the communities that shape the life and thought of modem Christians.31 As a result, as Gustafson famously put it, such a position makes Hauerwas's God "the tribal God of a minority of the earth's population."32 While any extended discussion of this debate goes far beyond the task at hand, Gustafson's broadside marks an important shift in Hauerwas's means of answering his critics, a task that for the first time included consideration of actual people in church. In defending his view of liturgy as ethics, Hauerwas takes on the task of attempting a careful description and interpretation of the significance of an administrative board meeting at his church at that time, Broadway United Methodist, in Notre Dame, Indiana. In so doing, he avoids speaking only about an ideal church. But rather than claim a sociological perspective, he argues that his "telling of the story" is normative in intent; it serves "not just as an example but as an argument for how Christian ethics ought to be done."33 Such a telling is informed by, as well as being an attempt to test, his constructive theological and ethical positions. At stake, it seems, was whether in fact his understanding that liturgy is social action can escape the charge of "sectarian." Through the example

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 283 of his congregation, he aims to show both that actual churches do act the way he thinks the church "should" and that the charge of sectarian misses the sort of "responsibility for the world" Hauerwas's view of liturgy as social action implies. Hauerwas describes a board meeting where two issuesrepairing the leaking roof and moving to weekly Eucharisttook center stage. Given the impoverished neighborhood surrounding the church, Hauerwas interprets the commitment of large sums of money for roof repair as a theological-ethical stance to be a witness of God's presence in and for that neighborhood. Weekly Eucharist, Hauerwas argues, subsequently led the congregation to propose not a soup kitchen for the needy, but rather an after church lunch shared among the members and all who wanted to come from the neighborhood. Again, this action held powerful symbolic and actual power for Hauerwas in that it embodied the church's calling to be a witness to the kingdom come near in Jesus Christ, and a concrete symbol to the neighborhood that all was not lost. While their first concern was not city politics, Hauerwas notes, their commitment to be a presence in the neighborhood included concern "about what was happening in the politics of the city."34 Hauerwas's empirical analysis of the church permitted him to develop a theological ethic that helps people "appreciate the significance of their worship." In Broadway, he saw a congregation formed and disciplined by the liturgy that made possible an extraordinary social witness. That congregation's life belies distinctions between theology and liturgy, ethics and liturgy. The meal they prepare every Sunday for the neighborhood is not the way they express their social ethical commitments in distinction from their liturgical life. Rather, the meal they prepare and liturgical life are for them parts of a single story. The theological task is first and foremost to help us and them understand why that is the case.35 He sets this as a crucial task for theology: we have not paid enough attention to how difficult it is to understand the common things we do as Christians: pray, baptize, eat meals, rejoice at the birth of a child, grieve at illness and death, re-roof church buildings, and so on. If we cannot describe theologically the significance of these activities, we will distort what we do by having to resort to descriptions and explanations all too readily provided by our culture.36 What our culture provides us, he says, are social scientific accounts of the life of congregations. He does not mean to "deny the value of sociological, psychological, and general social-scientific accounts of the life of congregations." Yet, he continues, "the issue is the uncritical use of the social-scientific paradigms

284 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics which often, if applied rigorously and consistently, methodologically preclude the theological claims necessary for the church's intelligibility."37 Holding such a view of social science places Hauerwas in a bind.38 On the one hand, he seeks to provide a theological description of the moral significance of liturgical practices in the lives of ordinary congregations. Yet, on the other hand, he warns against drawing on just the resources that, with critical use, may make such a description rigorous enough to make sense of what he rightly labels difficult work: the work of understanding the common things done by Christian communities. His latest book, Sanctify Them In Truth, shows him more deeply caught in this bind. He continues to advocate the centrality of descriptive work for the theological-ethical task. He asks "what kind of culture Christian practices produce" and adds that he "is convinced, moreover, that the only way to discover such practices is to try to describe what goes on in actual churches." But, he warns: "'description' is, of course, anything but innocent. The methodological assumptions that often shape the 'sociology' governing such descriptions reproduce the kind of 'spiritualization' of the church for which I am trying to provide an alternative. The following description will seem quite naive, as that is exactly what I want it to be."39 With this claim, Hauerwas defeats himself just short of success, and this in two senses. First, Hauerwas defeats his own aim of grounded theological work because he does not go far enough, carefully enough, in attending to congregational life. For example, Hauerwas emphasizes the importance of the liturgical practices of congregations generally, as well as how important eucharistie practices were at Broadway, but does not offer any description of those practices. He asserts that such practices were done and meditates on their theological meaning at length. This approach seems at best minimally to fulfill his own call to understand everyday practices of congregations, practices that are at once theological, liturgical, and ethical, but maybe also utilitarian and self-serving, shallow, or even explicitly unjust in one way or another. My advocacy of a critical, yet empathetic listening and questioning of congregational life does not repeat the external and causal critiques Saliers decries, nor the "spiritualization" of the church that worries Hauerwas, but instead calls for critical work that, because it has theological eyes, sees places where attempts to live out a Gospel life are frustrated by other commitments also formative of modem persons. Second, Hauerwas's polemically driven theological framework, "liturgy as ethics," does not include a view of culture nuanced enough to capture the impact of cultural pluralism forming contemporary Christians. Commitments to work, family, citizenship, physical and psychological well-being, and so on, all have legitimate roles for contemporary persons and congregations. Yet modem society tends to create in each sphere a significant tension with theological commitments because each sphere entails a separate moral logic that drives toward imperialism in relation to the others. Max Weber called this the problem of modem polytheism.40 Luther called it the problem of idolatry.41 Seen in theological or

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 285 sociological terms, this problem results in persons and communities living with multiple moral ideals and languages, aiming at multiple ends, each related to the various moral worlds in which they Uve. While critical use of sociology is not the only way to understand such complicated interconnections in the Christian moral life, it is one way to accomplish such a view.42 In summary, Saliers draws on a character ethics approach in arguing for an internal, conceptual link between liturgy and ethics, an approach quite amenable to qualitative, descriptive analysis. Furthermore, Hauerwas advances this approach both through his focus on liturgy as ethics and his attention to understanding the significance of liturgical practices in the lives of ordinary congregations. Saliers suggests the need for empirical investigation of churches; Hauerwas undertakes this investigation but only with the tools of "naive description." I say "only" not because I wish to minimize his normative and theological approach to descriptive and constructive work. Rather, I advocate a critical use of social science to enrich the resolution of the picture painted by description and to incorporate systematically the views of the participants in framing the picture. Such attention to the views of participants does not ensure total "objectivity," a concept under much criticism in the social sciences as well as philosophy.43 However, the systematic methods of social science add rigor to the listening process and allow the participants a voice in telling their story.44 I now turn to a description of the Shrine's identity, liturgy, and social ethics, setting up a concluding engagement of these theological debates about liturgy and ethics from this parish's perspective. The Shrine of the Immaculate Conception45 Communal identity The location of the Shrine does not immediately give a clear impression of its membership. An ox-blood brick gothic structure located in downtown Atlanta, Immaculate Conception is the oldest Roman Catholic church in Atlanta and one of the oldest standing buildings in the city. It faces on its various sides the goldendomed Georgia state capital building, the modem reflective-glass Fulton County Justice Center, and the gaudy red neon World of Coca Cola, a museum dedicated to the history of the "world's most popular soft drink." On any given Sunday morning, the diverse congregation includes young and old, singles and couples, gay and straight, families with children and without, able-bodied and physically or mentally challenged, well-off and homeless, highly educated and those with very little formal education. The majority, however, are college-educated, middle-class professionals in public and private service-sector jobs. While the majority are white, about forty percent are Black and a few are Asian or Hispanic. Although the majority are straight, nearly a third are gay or lesbian. While some trace

286 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics family histories back to the beginning of the parish, many joined during the tenure of the pastor, Fr. John, during the period of my study. While a good number of members Uve in the historic "parish", the majority does not. Parishioners live in all four quadrants of the city, both inside the "perimeter" and outside, with some driving up to forty minutes to get to mass on Sunday morning. Despite the demographic realities of the Shrine's membership, I quickly learned that there is remarkable consensus on congregational identity even if they have many words to describe it. In informal conversation and formal interviews, I asked people to share their view of the Shrine as a whole: what image would they pick to describe it? Why did they join? What do they like about it? The answers were quick, animated, and varied. According to members, the parish is welcoming, diverse, open, committed to outreach and social justice, relevant, and responsible. Images from old pamphlets and from some long-term members suggested, however, that the congregation's sense of itself has evolved. Long-time members and old pamphlets described the parish as historic, the mother-church of Catholicism in north Georgia, family-like, close-knit, as "our parish home" or "our beloved Shrine." Overall, the response showed that despite diversity of terms chosen by individuals, a clear pattern exists at the communal level. Recent work on congregations by sociologists argues that the "cultural models" congregations use to define their identity offer powerful ways to understand the distinctive structuring logic running through a congregation. Penny Edgell Becker's recent study of twenty-three congregations in a Chicago neighborhood found that "local religious cultures are not completely idiosyncratic, but that they come in patterns." Becker calls these patterns "congregational models" and argues that these models "are the sets of rules within a given institutional field that determine which bundles of elements go together and, therefore, which ones are available, functional, and appropriate, yielding a stable number of organizational types."46 In short, she argues, there is a internal and logical connection between claims about "who we are" and understandings of "how we do things here." Nineteen of her twenty-three congregations exhibited a predominant orientation to one of tie four models she found: houses of worship, family, community, and leader (the other four were in transition from one to another). I will explicate these types in relation to my need for understanding the Shrine; in brief, I offer here a summary of the four. Houses of Worship congregations focus on worship, religious education, and occasional services marking important life events such as birth, marriage, and death. Membership tends not to make significant demands on member loyalty and time. Family congregations see worship, religious education, and social activities that provide close-knit and supportive relationships as central. Community congregations embody the focus of the family congregation but tend to place high value on policies and programs that embody the values and commitments of members regarding social issues. Leader congregations, while upholding an attention to

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 287 worship and religious education, do not place as high a commitment on intimacy and social connections and instead focus on connections that serve an (not necessarily "liberal") activist mission to engage and change the world around them.47 The relevant models present at the Shrine became crystal clear for me as I interviewed Flora, a second generation Italian American, life-long Catholic, and a Shrine member for more than fifty years. After spending over an hour talking about the parish history and "how things used to be" I asked her, "So, what's changed?" Her abmpt answer jumped out of her mouth even before I finished my question. "Well," she said, "its less family and more service oriented." It is this shift, consolidated in my mind as I listened, that gave me a means to understand much of the current identity of the Shrine as the members see it. Flora's remark gives a clue both to the past and current dominant identity of the Shrine but also raises the question of the change. Becker found that four churches in her study did not have one clear identity but were in the (painful) process of shifting from one to another. Each of these churches stood out in her study because of the qualitatively different level of conflict in comparison to the others. In each case, the issues were brought to a head by a new minister who brought a new vision for the parish. And in each, people left the church as a result of the conflicteither the minister with some who supported him or her, or those who opposed the minister. The clash over cultural models highlights their structuring effect on the cultural and moral logic of the parish leadership, public ideals, activities, and moral commitments of a congregation. The models represent fundamentally different ways of doing things, so different in fact that they often lead to intractable disputes. Flora intuitively understood that this is what occurred upon the arrival of Fr. John. Prior to Fr. John's arrival, the parish was near exhaustion after its heroic struggle to maintain itself during the century-long decline of the downtown area. For decades it hovered just below 100 families and at numerous points faced serious prospects of closure. The Shrine was run by Franciscan priests from the mid-1950s until 1987 when Fr. John arrived, an era described by one life-long member as lacking vision, as a period of "drift."48 Yet, in part due to a core group of hard-working and committed members and the cache of its historical importance as the mother church of Catholicism in northern Georgia, the Shrine survived. Most of the people I spoke to from this era described the church as family. When asked what stood out over the years of her membership, an older member said, "I guess it's the familiness, the closeness, of the church. Growing up, there were two strikes against uswe were Yankees and Catholics."49 The memories of discrimination and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan reinforced the "community within a community" characteristic of American Catholicism during this era.50 Programs of this period fit the "family" modelthey are almost exclusively inner-directed religious and social in nature.51 These programs and groups

288 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics included the traditional Holy Name (men) and Altar (women) societies; Boy Scouts; devotions to the Blessed Sacrament and Mary through saying the rosary; monthly "family breakfasts" in the parish hall; and regular fund-raising events such as bake sales and raffles. Flora's preparation notes for leading the Altar Society meeting on Sunday, September 17, 1967, tell the story of the moral commitment required of the church "family": New Business: Our Cake Sale, Sun. Sept. 2; Why? (Rsum of expected billsMary Perry); Sign list - Make ahead, freeze, desperate for cakes; Up to us - get word around. In my interview with her, Flora recounted the way that bake sales made up the gap between giving and the basic budget, while also often providing needed money for repairs or special projects. Devoted family members and the priests that served them attended to the survival of the parish, care for building as their "spiritual home," and care for one another through good times and bad.52 Upon Fr. John's arrival, change from a "family" church to a "leader" church happened quickly. So quickly, in fact, that within a year, some people had left the church and a petition was circulating among long-time members asking the Archbishop to remove him.53 In my first interview with him, Fr. John said that when the Franciscans left in 1987 he thought the parish would close. From his perspective as pastor of a neighboring downtown parish, the Shrine had an "ethos focused on the past, almost as a museum."54 Fr. John came with a vision to turn the Shrine toward the present and the needs of the community around the church. In the homily on the Feast of the Pentecost, he extolled: So, Church, we need to be real clear that we don't have to go looking "Where is the Spirit?" "What is the Spirit doing?"the Spirit is breathing in us today. You and I are not here about history, we're not here about 2000 years ago Pentecost. We're here because the Spirit is working in us so that we might build God's kingdom now.55 He took up this vision and never relinquished it. Some members left but ultimately the church grew by 200 percent, a fact he attributes to the Shrine's "social outreach and people choosing to belong to such a parish."56 Becker suggests that pastors of "leader" congregations draw on their ritual and doctrinal authority in setting a vision and pressing for its fulfillment. As a result, they are treated as an authority but also as an ally or opponent depending on how one relates to the pastor's vision.57 Members of "leader" congregations find their membership important, in part, because it expresses specific social, political, and religious values. These are not, however, simply their own values but, led by the pastor, values seen as embodied

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 289 in the larger tradition or vision of the ideal. Outreach programs often make the pastor a civic leader as well, and give the congregation a reputation as a "leader," reinforcing the understanding of congregational identity held by the members. In fact, the Shrine was honored by the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta in 1995 with the Christian Council Award for Exemplary Congregation Community Outreach. A group of newer members told me that in looking for a church home, they visited many churches that felt "stale." The Shrine attracted them because it was more than just a warm and welcoming community. They also wanted "a level of commitment to those in neednot just paying for it so that they don't have to see it but actually doing the work."58 During Fr. John's tenure, the Shrine programs and activities included a homeless shelter; a soup kitchen; a weekly dinner for people with AIDS; work with a sister parish in Haiti; signing petitions against the death penalty; participation in the yearly gay pride parade; political organizing in ABLE (Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment); and others. Moral commitment to parish life is measured by commitment to a difficult openness that builds a diverse community and to "kingdom-building" work in people's individual Uves and together in the community. It should not be surprising, however, that the complexity of parish life at the Shrine is not fully illuminated by the "cultural models" in which a dominant model is assigned to each congregation on the basis of terms member use to describe themselves. This typological approach entails a reductionist effect because it focuses on what differentiates one type from the others, thus deemphasizing some key aspects of parish life. For example, Fr. John focused very diligently on developing "community" within the parish and across its diverse membership, a characteristic of "community" congregations more than "leader" types. Liturgical renewal is a second area that is central to the parish and typical of "house of worship" types but not highlighted in a focus on the "leader" model most dominant at the Shrine. Fr. John has used his pastoral authority to institute substantial liturgical shifts of emphasis in the parish's practice, with the intention that liturgy draw people more deeply into an encounter with God and a change in their own lives and the life of the community. It is to worship and the particulars of such pastoral intentions that I now turn. Liturgy Fr. John claims that the rites themselves are powerful enough to draw people into deeper communion with God, an experience which can transform people and make not only a personal but also a social difference. For Fr. John, this vision draws deeply on the influence of reforms set in motion by Vatican , the revolutionary Roman Catholic Council that concluded just as he entered seminary in the late 1960s. At root, this is a theological vision about the divine transformation of the people of God in worship so that they become disciples of Jesus, builders of the kingdom in the world and in their Uves. I recorded one

290 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics version of this vision in my notes on his Transfiguration Sunday homily, a homily that responded to the textfromMatthew 17 in which Jesus is joined by EUjah and Moses in a blinding mountain-top vision of glory witnessed by the disciples Peter, James, and John: We must not cut short the journey to Jerusalem by trying to prematurely stay in the glory on the mountain top; its point is to fill us with a vision of that Glory, of God's kingdom, and to give us a model, from Jesus' life, of discipleship so that we can engage in many acts of blessing, transfiguring the systems of the world right now. This goes on in providing a place for the homeless with the night shelter, feeding the hungry through the work of St. Francis Table, through coUecting powered milk for Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Haiti. According to the world, we have nothing in common with that parish in Haiti, but according to God's vision, we are sisters and brothers, members of the same body, and belong to each other. Our work with them transfigures the circumstances of poverty and malnutrition. This story of the transfiguration is not just a story of long ago, but we betieve, a story about how God works, how Jesus is present to us today in the Eucharist, that we might experience a taste of that glory and so be encouraged to join in the work of discipleship, of being a blessing to many.59 Fr. John not only preaches this message; he also attempts to embody it in the Uturgical life of the parish. While he attempts to faciUtate a "taste ofthat glory" in the weekly Eucharist, his most focused effort in this regard was his effort over his twelve-year pastorate to recover and revive the parish's celebrations during Holy Week and especially the Triduum, a three-day Uturgy stretching from Holy (or Maundy) Thursday through Good Friday to its conclusion in the Great Vigil of Easter on Saturday night. The Triduum, the metaphorical heart of the worshipping community at the Shrine, beats a life-blood through the parish during the rest of the year. This powerful, emotional, and dramatic three-day Uturgy after weeks of spare Lenten Uturgies draws together and constitutes the parish both as a distinctive community of people and as the theological "body of Christ," having died and risen with Jesus through the waters of baptism. One member describes it meaning: "The Triduum is for us, for me, is the culmination, it's everything that we betieve in, it's our whole faith, crammed into three days."60 Some weeks beforehand, I asked Fr. John what he expected and hoped for during the upcoming holy Week Uturgies. He said, first, that he hoped everything that needed to get done would and that "things come off weU." After this logistical worry, he then confided that his greatest hope was "to make the traditions accessible to people so to draw people in, to be influenced by therites."I asked why he had this concern, and he repUed that attendance historicaUy had not been that great but it had been getting better

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 291 over the last two or three years. I asked what accounted for the recent growth in attendance. He said that it "takes time to draw people in, for them to get used to the rites, to expect and look forward to them."61 Two key moments in the Holy Thursday turgy lustrate Fr. John's concern for rites that draw people in, that both offer a vision of God's kingdom and a model of Christ-centered discipleship aimed at "transfiguring the systems of the world." One key event opened the turgy. On this day a grand processional took place including altar servers, acolytes, ushers, the deacon, and priest, but also many lay members carrying every item needed for the turgy over the next three days. The procession was carried out by women and men, young and old, black and white, walking and wheelchair-bound, gay and straight, member and catechumen, clergy and lay. It was colorful, joyful, and done with a deberate step, savoring the glory of thefirstprocession since the beginning of February two months ago.62 When the Worship Committee met a week later to evaluate the Holy Week services, Fr. John was particularly moved in speaking of the powerful image the procession represented. It was to him an embodiment of who the Shrine is and at the same time a vision of what the Church should be. Brad, who carried the Pascal candle in the procession, put it this way: "here we were: multi-cultural, with homosexuals and heterosexuals, and in the eyes of a lot of people that was not acceptablethat's not what the CathoUc church is aU aboutand that's what I don't betieve in; you know, I think that church is church and community is community and it takes the whole group, no exclusion."63 The symboUc strength of the procession lay in its representation of the ideal and real achievement of community across difference at the Shrine. In interviews, members talked about the community in terms of tolerance for individual difference and aU people being God's creatures, part of the vision of the Church as the Pauline body of Christ, constituted by many members with differing gifts, aU needed in the work of the whole. The procession was visuaUy powerful, dramatic, and served Fr. John's ideal that rites be attractive and draw people into such an influential encounter with God that they in turn change the world. A second key moment in the Holy Thursday Uturgy takes place just after the reading of the traditional Gospel lesson from John 13 where Jesus kneels to wash his disciple's feet. In his homily, Deacon Bui encouraged the parishioners to help one another in simple, everyday ways so that through these actions they might develop strength as disciples, a strength that aUows one to face temptation and have the grace to do the right thing. Washing one another's feet, he said, may be a smaU thing, but, he admonished them, "do it as one way to Uve into the identity given us by Jesus, that of servant and disciple."64 The foot washing began simply by the worship leaders spreading out to the eight locations in front and in the rear where chairs, basins, pitchers, and towels were set for this purpose. A hymn/chant, "Jesus took a towel," began and the people around me began to take off their shoes and socks in the pew. In each case the minister or worship assistant

292 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics simply provided assistance to the parishioners who washed each other's feet, two by two. The rite had a flowing feeling, partly because of the chordal progression of the song influenced by the African American spirituals, partly because the water was warm and the bowls and pitchers of white china were beautiful, and partly because of the gentleness of the action. Most if not every single person present participated.65 Again, as with the procession, the foot-washing enacted strong symbolism of the real communal ties many feel at the shrine. (At the Cathedral of Christ the King, just a few miles north on Peachtree, Archbishop Donahue washed the feet of twelve pre-selected men from the parish, thus symboUcaUy enacting something quite different). It was not required that the community wash each other's feet as we did, but it was suggested and brought home the reatity of the assembly as the body of Christ together, taking on Christ's life and ministry of servanthood in the world, as in the message of Deacon Payne's homily. As one member, Susan, told me, "I mean, its so servile, and that total reversal of power creates new patterns of relationships." She had been so moved by theritualthat she had actually proposed a new model for management relations at her corporate office on the basis of the foot washing.66 Although in an important sense I have been discussing the moral life of the parish aU along, I now turn to an aU too brief account of the various social-ethical ("Outreach," as the Shrine terms them) ministries of the Shrine before returning in the conclusion to puU these threeidentity, turgy, and ethicstogether into an interpretation able to address theological constatais of the relation between turgy and ethics. Social Ethics High holy days and Sunday mass are not the only important uturgies impacting the social vision of the Shrine. There are more fluid, less formal uturgies, celebrated around other tables, where such a vision is expressed and enacted. For example, Walter, a second-generation custodian at the Shrine, led the church's effort to feed the homeless, coordinating volunteers and cooking for more than 500 men, women, and children every week since 1982.67 Often on Sunday mornings between the two services I would find Walter and various Shrine members talking around the table in the kitchen downstairs, drinking coffee, and eating cream donuts or sausage biscuits. This kitchen crowdwhose number at one time or another makes up a large percentage of the congregation have volunteered together for St Francis Table, for the night shelter, for AIDS ministries. Through this work of presiding at the tables of service, they connect to the parish identity and thus "make" the ties that bind turgy and social ethics. I caU these gatherings "uturgies" both because in the Uteral sense of the term, Uturgy is a pubUc service, a pubc work, and because of the centraty of these gatherings in doing the work of building a camaraderie that both comes out of and

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 293 affects participation in the main Eucharistie turgy. Attempting to make such connections, one kitchen regular remarked, "It's not so much turgy, okay? What's important is community, it's sharing your life that matters, it's what comes out of the Mass."68 It is what comes out of the Masstheir connection to one another, their commitments to the idea of the parish as diverse, sociaUy responsible, and so onthat, through working together over time, folds them into a soUdarity, into some common commitments to serve the needs of the city. Journalists and outsiders who visit the Shrine have noted three main ministries through which the Shrine serves the needs of the city. While these are central to the people's sense of identity as a congregation, the programs each grew too large for the Shrine to provide even the majority of the volunteer hours needed to run them. Each of the threea Tuesday night dinner for people with AIDS, a Saturday lunch for the homeless, and a nightly shelter for the homelessat one time mainly depended on the involvement of large numbers of Shrine members. One, the Tuesday night AIDS dinner, ceased in 1995 due in part to the growth of other AIDS services in the city, and a resulting decreased participation. The others are largely staffed by legions of volunteers from local campus ministries, from suburban parishes and parochial schools, and from churches of other denominations, although they are still organized and strongly supported by Shrine members. To be sure, there are many other outreach ministries beyond the three major ones. More occasional involvements include participation in marches (The Atlanta Gay Pride Parade, The Hunger Walk, the annual Walk for Life), tutoring in the near-by housing project, Capital Homes, and a partnership with a Haitian sister parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Such commitments have led to widespread recognition of the Shrine as a leader in social ministry. The Shrine received the Christian Council of MetropoUtan Atlanta award for exemplary church outreach in 1995. For members of the Shrine, such recognition and the ministries that correspond to it are at the core of the parish's image as a "leader" congregationa responsible congregation, a place, as Fr. John put it, where "hundreds of volunteers from aU over the city join in service to others."69 Most journalistic accounts of the Shrine do not go beyond this outward image, one that is indeed important to members, but is not the whole story. My presence in the congregationasking about the relation between liturgy and ethics, attending planning meetings, talking with individualsregularly eUcited joking and at the same time introspective reflections on the gap between ideals and commitments on the one hand and actual foUow-through on the other. Fr. John admitted that organizing efforts for deeper commitments among the congregation as a whole were tough going. Again and again in planning meetings, the problem of busy schedules and/or a lack of time came to the fore. As Fr. John looked forward to the summer of 1999 when he anticipated leaving the Shrine, he decided to work towards formalizing some of the scattered outreach efforts by starting an Outreach Committee. This committee, I would argue, is as important a

294 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics gauge of the social-ethical commitments of the Shrine as are the three "main" outreach programs mentioned above. On my second Sunday worshipping at the Shrine, I happened into a conversation with Laurie, the Rectory Manager for the Shrine and an Outreach Committee member. She warned me that not many people are really active in social outreachthat it is "hard to encourage the congregation to be active beyond one-time actions like coUecting dry milk to send to our sister parish in Haiti or doing a Habitat project."70 Indeed, Fr. John confided that his greatest regret in his outreach work at the Shrine was the lukewarm commitment members made to the city-wide church-based organizing project ABLE (Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment).71 While a few potical issues have been addressed, these were occasional protests organized primarily by Fr. John in conjunction with the ministers at nearby Central Presbyterian and Trinity United Methodist. To try to get closer to this dynamic of social commitment struggling toward but not quite reaching sustained social-poUtical analysis and action required by longer term projects, I wl return to the example of the Shrine Outreach committee's Easter season project on the death penalty (see my opening vignette about Lois). During the March planning meeting, the Outreach Committee chairwoman, Susan, talked some about long-range planning but at Fr. John's encouragement came back to discussion of "what next." Shuffling through a pile of mail in front of him, Fr. John said that various things had come to him in the mail. One in particular, a petition campaign to put a moratorium on the death penalty, according to Fr. John, "is something that the Pope has been speaking about and would give us an opportunity to tie in some education on the church's social teaching so that people know what stands the Cathoc church has taken on some of these issues."72 Given the Christian Council of Atlanta's (CCA) upcoming April breakfast with Sr. Helen Prejean, author o Dead Man Walking, this idea seemed to be just therightone. Fr. John suggested that many in the pews would be supporters of the death penalty and the issue would therefore need attention in turgy and adult education before any "action" took place. Taking Fr. John's ideas, the group enthusiasticaUy planned a five part process. Week by week the program would include viewing the video of Dead Man Walking with discussion; two consecutive Sundays with morning adult education classes on the topic; mention of the issue in the prayers and homies; and finaUy attendance at the CCA prayer breakfast with Sr. Prejean. With Fr. John agreeing to take care of details in conversation with the Life Concerns Committee under whose purview the issue also feU, the meeting adjourned. The events went off weU, one by one. The first Sunday, around forty people ate lunch together and viewed the video Dead Man Walking. The second Sunday, Fr. John preached powerfiiUy about how "faith in God should shape our attitudes toward one very significant issue in our society: the death penalty." He chaUenged those who might view the death penalty as acceptable: "We come together today

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 295 as God's people to affirm that our faith is in God's ways. And the Easter chaUenge, if you wl, is that whenever our attitudes are not transformed by God's power, then we have not fiiUy entered into the meaning of Jesus' victory over sin and death."73 That same Sunday the first adult education event was led by Ron, a Shrine Life Issues Committee member, Pax Christi activist, and death row lay minister. He outlined the empirical arguments against the death penalty but said that, despite these, the vast majority of the American population say they support it. He led a skillful discussion to get at the attitudes that each of us harbor giving rise to the urge for vengeance. The second adult education event, led by Andy, another Life Issues Committee member and also a death row lay minister, gave an extended introduction to a Georgia death row inmate, Ron, whom Andy visits each month. This personal introduction to an inmate led to a discussion of how to develop a position of opposition of the death penalty. Ken, a new Catholic, summed up his own transformation on the issue over the past weeks in this way: "I remember when Tip O'NeiU came out with his book, All Politics is Local. I think that a good paraphrase might be aU religion is personal. It's not the institution that does things, it's people."74 The April Outreach Committee meeting feU on the Monday after the last adult education event and after the breakfast with Sr. Prejean, but in time to finalize plans for a concluding event that would, in the words of Outreach Committee chair, Susan, "take action on our faith, provide ways to take action." She reported that the events were well attended and that there were about forty people "psyched" to do something. Betti warned that it must be an individual action, not a corporate action, for a response on this issue is "a matter of the heart." Susan suggested that indeed individual events had worked in the pastthey could have an anti-death penalty petition to sign, or an opportunity to write a letter to a death row inmate. My field notes show the back and forth exchange of ideas marking a most extraordinary discussion: Larry then jumped in, sort of struggling for words, "What does oneit feels so finalthis person is going to diewhat does one write? To which Andy said, "Friendly stuff, like a pen-pal." "Each person is an individualjust get to know them." But, he continued, "you have to keep in mind that some can't write, some are retarded, and it is rare that they can keep up an active pen pal relationship." Paul wondered aloud if the parish could "adopt" a death row prisoner. Betti jumped in and said, "I have a problem with that." First, she said, "security makes it unfeasible." It is a difficult six month process to aUow permission to visit and only a few are granted the right per inmate. Second, "a 'parish' can't estabUsh a relationship with an 'individual.'" She suggested "we could pray for people as a parishjust like we have our prayer intentions." Andy suggested that the people he and Ron currently visit and write to could be prayed for. Larry suggested "an angel tree like we

296 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics had at Christmas." He recaed that they "had a tree with the names of needy kids and a brief story about them on a tree and you could take one and get a gift for them. He said, 'Tor the death row inmates, we could have a name and a story to take home, you know, keep on the refrigerator, to keep in prayer, and have a point person to give updates on the person's status on death row as it changes. It would be good to have specific names to pray for, not like when we pray for our sister parish in Haiti." Fr. John jumped in and said, "Oh, Fr. Roberto wants to change that, he wants us to visit, to meet them. He'd have lots of names for us." Ron came in at this point and pressed for doing more than the "angel tree" ideahe raised signing the moratorium on the death penalty and having an opportunity to write and visit death row inmates. Larry led the discussion and kept raising the point that without a name and a brief story, and a nice quote, it wouldn't "touch people's hearts." He said "we need a personal story; just a name is boring, a story makes it more personal." Ultimately, a compromise action plan was worked out and Larry agreed to help organize it along with Fr. John and the Life Committee members.75 The next Sunday, the final event took place. Just before the benediction, the parish said together "A Prayer to Abolish the Death Penalty" written by Sr. Prejean and inserted in the buUetins on three by five cards. At each Mass, an Outreach Committee member announced the success of the series of events related to the death penalty and invited members to stop by the tables in the rear of the church where they could sign a petition against the death penalty and pick up a flyer with the name and story of the two death row inmates whom Shrine members visit. Shrine members could pray for them, write them, or learn how to become a visitor on Georgia's death row. The parish would continue to pray for the inmates, and the congregation would receive regular updates on the inmates Uves and changes in their status. About half the congregation took part, coming to the tables to sign the petitions or pick up the colorful flyers with vignettes about the two death row inmates, Ron and Andrew. Much, much more could be said about the Shrine but what I have described gives a portrait of some of the Shrine's life and work, in part through their own words, but always through my hearing and framing. I turn now to the longpromised conclusion in which I draw these threads of community identity, Uturgical life, and social-ethical action together into an interpretation that both deepens and critiques aspects of the prevailing ethical theories about the relation between turgy and ethics.

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 297

Conclusion: Lois, Liturgy and Ethics To say Lois, turgy and ethics is to focus attention on the neglected role of congregation's communal identity in relation to the church's worship and moral witness. This claim entails three interrelated points. First, the basic claim of character ethics is misplaced in so far as it does not take account of the central role of the communal identity, influencing the particular style of worship and ethical action in a congregation. Second, neglecting the role of communal identity leads to an overemphasis on Uturgy's formative power, missing how communal identity forms not only through participation in the church but also through socio-cultural influencessuch as individualismand institutionssuch as famy, work, and schoolthat are, in one sense, "beyond" the church. Lastly, I argue that the Shrine's common identity enables them to enact powerful Uturgical rites. Yet, such powerful rites, while formative for the young and for converts, are better seen as embodiments of communal identity that work as a reinforcement of faith as it is Uved out in the parish. In Fr. John's terms, the turgy at the Shrine offers a Eucharistie "taste" of God's glory that carries within the "taste" an invitation, an encouragement, to "join the work" of discipleship. The Neglected Role of Communal Identity Both Hauerwas and SaUers suggest that Uturgy forms individual Christians and the church as a whole. Through such formation Christian social-ethical witness is made possible. They both have nuanced positions, including the recognition that the turgy is also expressive of, or formed by, the virtues of its participants. Further, they argue that the narratives of the Christian faith, the Christian "story," provide the orienting substance embodied in people's habits through common worship. My research suggests that this linear framing of the questionthat turgy directly forms Christiansmisses the way that congregational identity legitimates the particular power of its worship whe also framing the ways that worship influences that community's moral life. Liturgy and its enactment are infused with the particular social and cultural characteristics of membership and location. This is nowhere more profound than in the complex identity of the community gathered to worship in a particular place. Who they are and who they are becoming exist in dynamic interrelationship with the acts of worship, mercy, and justice that they enact and that influence them in return. I recognize that there is an infinite regress of compUcating factors when one looks closely at the sub-groups or, beyond that, the diversity of individuals, who make up one parish community. This is why I find helpful Becker's recent research showing the power of a dominant communal identity. Such an identity provides a structuring logica mode of Uvingthat

298 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics makes some ways of doing things natural and right whe others awkward or not even mentioned. Members at the Shrine saw Lois's participation in the Ufe of the parish as "natural and right" even if at times her outbreaks of profanity were "sUghtly annoying." The cooperative leadership between Fr. John and key lay people drew variously on Uberai notions of tolerance and Christian notions of baptism into Christ's body in bunding a sense of communal identity that would rather welcome her (albeit disruptive) participation rather than discourage or even bar her from the property, as members claimed other churches would do. Their particular congregational identity sustained the disposition to recognize Lois's presence and participation as "only right." The Multiple Sources of Communal Identity Once the central role of the particular community of faith and its common identity enters the discussion of Uturgy and ethics, the question of thejoots ofthat common identity comes to the fore. If the church is a "storied community" as SaUers and Hauerwas claim, then which stories, exactly, constitute such identity? Since the members not only worship God together but also are involved in many other spheres of social life, such a claim begs for contextualization in order to make sense. It wl not do to simply roU out church-world distinctions; in so many ways the church is "worldly" even insofar as it fulfiUs its calling to be a witness in the world of the world redeemed.76 Some examplesone structural and one culturalshow how social influences both aUow and limit the Shrine's Christian witness. St. Francis Table, the Saturday lunch for the homeless, and the Central Night Shelter can be seen as ministries both caed forth and yet limited by the structural issue of the Shrine's physical location in the old downtown of a sprawling metropoUtan area. The slow abandonment of the central city by famies, businesses, and even churches created the conditions for high concentrations of people with few options, many of whom Uve in housing projects on the edges of the old downtown. The Shrine's physical location, then, offered to the community options for ministry simply by the fact that homeless and hungry people constantly knocked on their door and slept on their steps. Yet, whe the commitment to stay and to reach out through various ministries to these many needy people helped estabUsh the shrine's commitment to action, the fact that most of its middle-class professional membership Uved scattered aU over the MetropoUtan area added a "commute tax" to any activities in which they participated at church. This fact, whe regularly overcome, nonetheless haunted many planning meetings and gave cause for reaUsm in estimating participation in a particular event. The example of the Shrine Outreach Committee's work on the Easter season project on death penalty issues provides me with a means to expUcate a more

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 299 subtle influence, the cultural language of expressive personasm or individualism. In the American professional middle-class population generaUy sociologists have noted an increasingly common and influential "individual-expressive style" of moral understanding and commitment.77 In part tied to the post-World War rise of a professionaUy educated middle class and its tendency toward high mobity, this growing trend increasingly impacts the culture of many congregations with this demography. This is especiaUy true in the Shrine's context of Atlanta, a strongly middle-class and mobe city. Ken, a Shrine member, offered a summary of the power of reUgion that embodies such a emphasis on expressive individualism: "AU reUgion is personal. It's not the institution that does things, it's people." RecaU, for a moment, the discussion about what action to take at the end of the series of events on the issue of the death penalty. On the one hand, personalizing the pght of those on death row aUowed Shrine members to express their values and appeal to others in their efforts to do what they see is right. Such a perspective echoes an appeal to a religious individuasm as old as our nation. As Betti suggested in an Outreach Committee meeting, asking for corporate action by the Shrine is in a sense misplaced because commitment to this issue is "a matter of the heart." Such a focus on the heart clearly made a way for Ken to rethink his position on the death penalty. Such is the power of the emotional appeal. Whe social critics like Robert BeUah worry about the durabity of such commitment based on "how I feel about it," recent research concludes that the prevalence of this language for speaking of commitment may not necessarily be an adequate mirror of deeply held values and commitments, at least for active members of an organization.78 On the other hand, such dependence on the modes of expressive individualism limits the scope of response; almost all suggestions for concluding the death penalty program were individual, interpersonal, and emotion-based: writing "friendly stuff, like a pen-pal" to a death row inmate, adopting a death row inmate, or most astonishing, constructing an "angel tree" aUowing members to select a death row inmate complete with a name and heartwarming story to post on the refrigerator. Such personasm flattens the moral language and imagination, thus hiding questions about its fairness and legaty, not to mention moral lightness. Further, the personasm precluded any discussion of turning this nascent heart-felt connection toward systemic and institutional pocy analysis and a more sustained coUective response.79 The one exception to this avoidance of coUective response, a powerful suggestion of corporate prayer on behalf of those on death row, focused on individual death row inmates whose stories they knew. Communal Identity and Liturgy 's Modes of Influence Third, and last, I come fidi circle to the question that began my research: how does participation in corporate worship change the Christian as moral agent? The

300 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics answer begins by pointing out that Uturgical power, or at least its effect on those gathered, depends in significant ways on the identity of the gathered community. But stiU, what specificaUy does Uturgy do? Does it form Christians as character ethics claims? Certainly, turgy does not always and equaUy enact such formative power. At times, especiaUy for young chdren and for converts (e.g., those for whom the communal style of ritual enactment is new and attractive), the turgy can be strongly formative in giving shape to one's senses, affections, habits of feeling, thinking, beUeving, and behaving. Furthermore, if Ann Swidler is correct, during unsettled times during Ufe (as experienced by individuals or whole communities) turgy may be formative in the way it is for a new convertold patterns have broken apart and new ways can be found in the patterns of the worshiping community.80 Even so, however, such formation happens in ways that "fit" the dominant ethos of a congregation. I found through research at the Shrine, however, that for most people most of the time the Uturgy is less a "school for the affections" then a reinforcement and reminder of what is important in Ufe as they envision it in that place. Such a reinforcing role would have the most powerful effect when the parish membership works in a shared and dynamic relationship with the pastoral leadership. Thus, I would argue, Uturgy does not form or change the Christian as moral agent most of the time. It certainly does not effect any simpstic "transformation" as some theological and uturgical writing indicates. The Shrine worships in a certain way, a way that embodies a vision of who its members understand themselves to be, or, at least, who they feel they ought to be. The vision includes things they did not "make up"the historic liturgy as a pattern of word and gesture, the scripture texts, the architecture, the parish history. They work through this vision in a process of interpretation, both using the givens to their purpose and filling the flexible spaces with their own strategies of artful improvisation. They are not so much doing this in a calculated way as they are doing it because this is 'how it should be done.'81 This claim does not in any way deny the role of the pastoral leadership nor, for that matter, the movement of the Holy Spirit. Rather, it suggests that at the Shrine, Uturgical celebrations resonate powerfuUy not only because they are done in ways that are mbricaUy correct or aestheticaUy powerful but also because they lift up andrituaUyembody die common ideals constituting the community as church. In this, Fr. John's Uturgical leadership had been of central importance for the development of the Shrine's Ufe. His efforts provided a strong uturgical, theological, and moral vision to form and sustain a Christian center and orientation for Uves strongly formed by other social loyalties. His twelve-year effort to strengthen the Holy Week Uturgies in the parish's life provide a key example of this process. Numerous people I interviewed said that they had experienced being drawn deeper into their faith, and in most cases directly tied this to Uturgical experience, especiaUy Triduum. Fernando and others in a RENEW faith conversation group suggested that the deepening of their faith led

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 301 to changes at work-efforts, in their words, to make work "a ministry, something meaningful."82 Here one specific story stands out. Susan, one of the RENEW group members, spoke about how powerful the holy Thursday foot washing was for her. She noted how "serve" foot washing is and how it is a reversal, how it creates new patterns of relationship. She reported going into the office on Monday and suggesting that model for revision of corporate management. She told them, "they ought to have the CEO go serve coffee and listen to aU the managers who were under him or her, and then have the managers do that for those who are under them, and so on." Through this, she suggested, the practice would create a reversed hierarchy of servanthood as a strategy for buding relationships and for transforming the corporate structure. People at the shrine laughed and responded with both amusementas one said, "WeU, why don't you go aU the way and teU them were the idea came from and then have them wash feet!"and deght in the power ofthat service and ritual which aU of them experienced. They said that is the sort of community the Shrine is and thinks it ought to bepeople knowing one another and building patterns of relationship, recognizing the people whose feet they washed and who washed their feet.83 In his recent book, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics, WilUam C. Spohn uses theritualof foot washing in the congregation on Holy Thursday as a test case for his constructive proposal to bridge the example of Jesus and contemporary experience.84 As Spohn would argue, Jesus' actions have nothing to do with a corporate boardroom UteraUy. One could "wash feet" as a Uteral re-enactment; or one could dismiss Jesus' action as having no bearing on corporate management. Yet neither of these is right. Rather, the key question is how an appropriate analogous action is chosen, one that somehow captures the symboc power of the original practice. In this view, what Susan described is not so much a process of Uturgical formation but rather an artful improvisation, an analogical translation of the symboc power of what she experienced in the ritual enactment of the foot washing at the Shrine. Her participation in a shared understanding of communal identity both aUowed theritualof washing feet to have a certain power for her and offered her a frame for responding to this powerful experienceshe "joined the work of discipleship" by taking a model of the kingdom found in worship and using it to "transfigure systems of the world right now." NOTES

^ a n k s most of all to Fr. John Adamski and the **people living church" at the Atlanta's Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for opening their parish and their lives to me during my four months of research. Also, thanks to anonymous reviewers for the Annual and to teachers and friends, here at Emory and elsewhere, who offered great assistance: James Gustafson, Thrse Lysaught, Don Saliers, Steve Tipton, Sonja Batalden, Robby Jones, Graham Reside, and Ted Smith.

302 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics

2 Ralph B. Potter, Jr., "The Logic of Moral Argument," in Paul Deats, Jr., ed., Toward A Discipline of Social Ethics (Boston: Boston University Press, 1972), 106. 3 Mark Searle, "Liturgy and Social Ethics: An Annotated Bibliography," Studia Liturgica 21 (1991):220-235; William C. Spohn, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 1999). 4 Here, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of the social conditions of effectiveness in ritual. He delineates certain conditions that must be met forritualto be authorized as powerful: a legitimate leader, situation, audience, and form or mode of action, all undergirded by the most important, a disposition to recognition of ritual power. See his "Authorized Language: The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse," in John B. Thompson, ed. Language and Symbolic Power, Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 113. By this term, however, I do not deny God's authority as the moving force in worship and the One to whom worship is directed; yet this power does not come in generic form but incarnates in particular ways given the people and context of their gathering. 5 Field notes from Sunday, 4/25/99. 6 Field notes from Shrine Outreach Meeting, 4/26/99. interview with Brenda, 4/22/99. 8 Fr. David was a guest prsider for this liturgy. interview with Betti, 4/22/99. 10 Fieldnotes from Sunday, 4/18/99. "Interview with Flora, 11/10/99. l2 In what follows, multiple definitions of 'ethics' as well as 'worship' and 'liturgy' are in play. When not discussing the work of other writers, I follow these understandings. By liturgy, I mean the embodied practices of individual and communal song, prayer, preaching, eating, etc. that make up an ordered means to worship God. By ethics, I mean embodied practices that order a 'way of life' consonant with one's prayer and praise of God. I have in mind here something like Hegel's Sittlichkeit, an approach that helps make sense of the congruence between congregational identity and styles of worship and work. l3 James M. Gustafson, "Christian Faith and Moral Action," The Christian Century 82 (November 3,1965): 1345-7. 14 James M. Gustafson, "Context Versus Principles: A Misplaced Debate in Christian Ethics," Harvard Theological Review 58 (April 1965): 171 -202. 15 James M. Gustafson, Christ and The Moral Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 263n. 16 James M. Gustafson, "Spiritual Life and Moral Life," in Theology and Christian Ethics (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1974), 175. 17 See for example Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (New York: MacMillian, 1962); Peter Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America (New York: Doubleday, 1961). 18 Don E. Saliers, "Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings," Journal ofReligious Ethics 7 (Fall 1979): 173 (subsequent references in the text by page number). 19 See Don E. Saliers, "Afterword: Liturgy and Ethics Revisited," in Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch before God, E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill , eds. (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 216-217; also the discussion of "expressive individualism" as one of the primary moral languages in American life in Robert N. Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996/1985). 20 For example, vote with other citizens, shop at the mall with other consumers, look at paintings with other art lovers, and work with others to pay the bills, if not fulfill one's true vocation. See Gustafson, Christ and the Moral Life, 263. 2 'Notable here is the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); The Logic of Practice, Richard

Lois, Liturgy, and Ethics 303

Nice, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and the recent use of Bourdieu by David F. Ford in elaborating a vision of a 'Eucharistie self in his Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 137ff. 22 Margaret A. Farley, "Beyond the Formal Principle: A Reply to Ramsey and Saliers," Journal of Religious Ethics 7:191-202. 23 As evidence for lack of attention to such study in the field of Christian ethics, one could look at the recent mapping of the field in the volume Christian Ethics: Problems and Prospects, Lisa Sowie Cahill and James F. Childress, eds. (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1996). It contains almost no mention of worship at all, let alone serious engagement of the question despite its importance for James M. Gustafson whose legacy to the field the volume honors. This lacuna was not lost on Gustafson, who in his "Afterword" notes the absence, gently scolding his former students for the neglect. 24 Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church As Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 12. 25 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 98. 26 Ibid, 99. 27 Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living in Between (Durham: The Labyrinth Press, 1988), 102. 28 Ibid, 106. 29 Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 69. 30 Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today, 107. 31 James M. Gustafson, "The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University," Catholic Theological Society ofAmerica Proceedings 40 (1985):83-94. 32 James M. Gustafson, "Response to Critics," Journal of Religious Ethics 13 (Fall 1985): 196. 33 Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today, 113. 34 Ibid, 122. 35 Ibid, 125. 36 Ibid, 123-124. 37 Ibid, 130n. 38 0n my reading, John Milbank ends up in this bind as well. He soundly trounces theological dpendance on social science, describing this phenomenon of modern theology with the strong and memorable term "policing the sublime." See Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), lOlff. Milbank views the Church "by virtue of its institution" as a society that 'reads' other societies. According to Milbank, this view allows consideration of "ecclesiology as also a 'sociology'. But it should be noted that this possibility only becomes available if ecclesiology is rigorously concerned with the actual genesis of real historical churches, not simply with the imagination of an ecclesial idea" (Ibid, 381). Yet, his exegesis of Augustine combined with throw-away lines about "base communities" hardly constitute what I would call rigorous concern with the actual genesis of real historical churches. 39 Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in Truth (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 160n. ^Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," 129-156, and "Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions," 323-359 in Girth and Mills, trans, and ed., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); and see also Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) and Robert N. Bellah, "Max Weber and Word-Denying Love: A Look at the Historical Sociology of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67 (June 1999) :2 77-304. 41 Martin Luther, "The Large Catechism," in The Book of Concord, Theodore G. Tappeti, et. al., ed. and trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 365ff.

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42

My colleague, Ted Smith (and our mutual reading of John Milbank) pushes me to consider what theological and properly Christian modes of careful attending might be cultivated. As a Christian practice leading to skills of observation and attention, he suggested spiritual disciplines, including a spiritual director who helps to differentiate the log in one's own eye from the speck in the other's. I suggested the practice of confession, repentance, and selfexamination. Each of these holds promise yet even with the attractiveness of such traditional Christian practices for attending to others, I remain formed by my education in the social sciences and am grateful for the continuing insight I gain from many of its practitioners. 43 In social science, see James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). In philosophy, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). "On ethnographic writing and representation after the crisis symbolized by the Clifford and Marcus Writing Culture volume, see John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and M. Wolf, Thrice-Told Tales: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 45 This paper is part of a larger dissertation research project titled "Public Worship and Public Work" that will do cross-comparison between three case congregations: the Shrine, Central Presbyterian, and Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, each of them old vibrant downtown Atlanta churches. Through the work of descriptive and normative ethics, I ask each congregation how congregational identity, worship, and social ethics interrelate. I will especially attend to the ways polity, race and socio-economic status, and the community's participation in other formative institutions and cultural traditions in turn shape the distinctive ways each church articulates Christian ideals and struggles to embody them in its life. This project follows the extended case method (see Michael Burowoy, "The Extended Case Method," Sociological Theory 16 (March 1998):4-33), an ethnographic approach that requires testing a specific theory in a case study while understanding that forces outside the case impact and are impacted by the case (thus, 'extension' beyond the confines of the case is assumed necessary). Research for this paper is based on four months of participation in the parish's life; approximately 80 hours of actual presence at worship, committee meetings, social gatherings, etc., and formal interviews of 20 people and informal interviews with many more. I collected historical materials, documents of all sorts (worship programs, devotional guides, meeting handouts, membership directories, educational materials, worship planning materials, etc.) and used this material both to fill in details and as a check on my own observations. While explicitly identifying myself as an Emory doctoral student conducting dissertation research, I nonetheless fully participated in the life of the parish. ^Penny Edgell Becker, Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12. 47 Ibid, 12-14 and chapters 3-6. 48 William, Shrine oral history interview from 9/30/94. 49 Dorothy, Shrine oral history interview from 9/30/94. 50 See Michael J. McNally, "A Peculiar Institution: A History of Catholic Parish Life in the Southeast (1850-1980)," in Jay P. Dolan, ed., The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present Vol 1 (New York: Paulist, 1987); Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners who Build America's Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage, 1997). 5 decker, Congregations in Conflict, 80f. "Minutes from Altar Society Meeting, 9/17/67; Interview with Flora,4/20/99. "Mabel, Shrine oral history interview from 9/30/94; informal interview 5/2/99. 54 Interview with Fr. John, 2/27/99. 55 Field notes from Sunday, 5/30/99. 56 Interview with Fr. John, 2/27/99. "Becker, Congregation in Conflict, 143f.

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58

RENEW group interview, 5/10/99. Field notes from Sunday 2/28/99. ^Interview with Betti, 4/22/99. 61 Interview with Fr. John, 3/20/99. 62 Field notes from Holy Thursday, 4/1/99. "Interview with Brad, 4/14/99. "Field notes from Holy Thursday, 4/1/99. 65 Field notes from Holy Thursday, 4/1/99. ^Susan from the RENEW group interview, 5/10/99. 67 Mr. Moore died this past August, 1999, yet the weekly ministry goes on as he would have wanted. 68 Interview with Betti, 4/22/99. 69 Fr. John, quoted in Rita Mclnerney, "Christian Council Honors Shrine for Outreach," Georgia Bulletin, 3/30/95. 70 Field notes from Sunday, 2/21/99. 71 Field notes from ABLE Metro-Atlanta Action, 5/2/99. 72 Fr. John quoted in Field notes for Outreach Committee meeting, 3/22/99. 73 Field notes from Sunday, 4/18/99. 74 Field notes from Sunday, 4/25/99. 75 Field notes from Outreach Meeting, 4/26/99. 76 I draw this phrase from Aidan Kavanagh's provocative meditations in On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992). ^See Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart; also Phillip Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). 78 See Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); also Becker, Congregations in Conflict, esp. 21 Iff. 79 Bellah et. al., The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Becker, Congregations in Conflict, 210. 80 Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies" American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986):278-279. 81 These reflections follow Bourdieu's subtle evocation of the difference between "rules" and "strategies" in Outline of a Theory of Practice, 15ff. "Interview with Brad, 4/14/99. "RENEW group interview, 5/10/99. 84 William C. Spohn, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 1999), 51-54.
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