Dear Colleagues,

As the world is now painfully acknowledging, the global pandemic of 2020 has triggered drastic changes across a wide swath of arenas: from education to business, from health care to politics. No less affected is the practice of worship in the midst of this health crisis and the parallel theologizing about evolving liturgical practices across world religions and in local faith communities. Not surprisingly, the rapidly evolving array of in-person as well as digital responses to COVID-19 have opened access to many worship events while simultaneously exacerbating existing inequities in worship. This Special Issue of Religion will examine the upheaval in worship practices sparked by this pandemic as well as the theologizing about these evolving practices.

This is new territory for the area of liturgics and for practical-liturgical theologians who reflect upon worship practices. For example, while multiple health care professionals are pondering the impact of this global health crisis on their medical practices, most pastoral ministers are scrambling to respond to governmental and ecclesial guidelines and restrictions with little time to ponder the short term—much less long term—effects of this required improvisation.

Based on the presupposition that worship itself is to be a just act, authors will give special attention to the ethical implications of such emerging liturgical practices in pondering how liturgy and the allied field of liturgical studies might contribute to distributive, racial, gender, and other forms of justice. Worship is such a presumed service of faith communities that seldom do they reflect upon the justice implications of the ways in which such worship is enacted. This is parallel, for example, to the lack of reflection by education systems on the justice implications of their pedagogical and social delivery systems. The radical and abrupt move to on-line education during the 2020 pandemic has exposed the possibilities and also the systemic inequities in existing educational systems. Analogously, a basic concern of this Special Issue of Religion is not only how worship communities are coping and improvising worship responses, or even how a few are theologizing about them, but, equally importantly, how the underlying ethical dimensions of worship and its performance, accessibility, and assessment in all of its ethical dimensions are being addressed. As yet, there is no sustained or widespread reflection on this topic, and this is a pioneering enterprise and breakthrough in theologizing on the topic.

Prof. Dr. Edward Foley
Guest Editor

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• pandemic
• worship
• COVID-19
• ethics
• accessibility