Christian ritual dominated the lives of Indigenous children sent to Canadian residential schools for the purpose of cultural assimilation. Drawing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (2015), I describe the complex, ambiguous, and often harmful role of Christian liturgical practices in residential schools. I provide a theoretical frame built on the work of Foucault, Asad, and Belcher to explore Christian rituals in residential schools as formative, embodied disciplines that functioned as technologies of power, self, and community. This theoretical frame exposes how religious rituals may unwittingly victimize participants, how the same ritual can be experienced as a harmful imposition by one participant and a source of personal fulfillment by another, and how ritual could be part of an ongoing process of truth-telling and reconciliation.
A significant liturgical controversy of the COVID-19 pandemic is whether Christians should celebrate communion online. Much of the discussion of online communion has been based on theological and theoretical claims, rather than concrete observations and experiences, and much of this reflection has been directed toward specific denominational contexts. In contrast, this ethnographic study centers on participant observation of twelve worship services that included communion, or would ordinarily have included communion, that occurred between Holy Thursday and Easter Sunday of April 2020 in Free Church, mainline Protestant, Anglican, and Roman Catholic settings. It takes the approach of receptive ecumenism and asks what gifts Christians from various traditions can receive from one another in relation to online communion both during and beyond times of crisis. Rather than making a case for or against celebrating communion online, it explores the ways in which community is demonstrated and effected in online communion practices.
How can religious ritual foster solidarity in religiously diverse communities in times of crisis? This question is crucial in social contexts characterized by increasing religious and nonreligious diversity and ongoing intersecting crises associated with violence, inequality, and climate change. Solidarity is necessary both as an immediate response to crisis and to the pursuit of long-term solutions that address underlying causes. Situated in the literature on disaster ritual, this study draws on Randall Collins’ sociological theory of interaction ritual chains to analyze the weekly ritual of sharing “Joys and Concerns” followed by a “Meditation” practiced by a theistically diverse Unitarian Universalist congregation. Anchored in one year of ethnographic research in this community, it concludes that the trusted structures, shared stories, and embodied symbols associated with this practice contain the ritual ingredients necessary to produce social solidarity in response to personal and societal crises and may be a model to apply in other religiously diverse contexts.
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