2011 Faculty

James Abbington is Associate Professor of Worship and Music at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. His research interests include music and worship in the Christian church, African American sacred folk music, organ, choral music, and ethnomusicology. Dr. Abbington serves as executive editor of the African American Church Music Series by GIA Publications (Chicago) and co-director of music for the Hampton University Ministers' and Musicians' Conference. He has served as the national director of music for both the Progressive National Baptist Convention and the NAACP.

Dorothy Bass is the director of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith (www.practicingourfaith.org), a Lilly Endowment project that explores the importance of practices in Christian life and considers how greater attention to practices might contribute to theology and theological education. In addition to publishing several scholarly volumes on practices, edited or coedited by Bass, the Valparaiso Project has created several books that are widely used in congregations and other ministry settings, and has worked directly with some of these to strengthen communities of practice.

Teresa Berger is professor of liturgical studies at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. She holds doctorates in both liturgical studies and systematic theology; her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of those fields with gender history and with cultural studies. She has written extensively on liturgy and gender and is currently completing a monography titled Unveiling Liturgy’s Past: Gender History and the Making of Liturgical Tradition. Previous publications include Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (2001); Fragments of Real Presence (2005); and avideo documentary called Worship in Women’s Hands (2007). Berger has also published monographs on the hymns of Charles Wesley and on the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival. In 2008, Professor Berger produced (with MysticWaters Media) an interactive CD-ROM, Ocean Psalms. Most recently, she co-edited the volume The Spirit in Worship—Worship in the Spirit (published by Liturgical Press, 2009). Professor Berger has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Mainz, Münster, Berlin, and Uppsala. In 2003, she received the distinguished Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church.

Emily Brink is a Senior Research Fellow at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship; her areas of responsibility include conference planning and global resources. She was founding editor of Reformed Worship, a quarterly journal of worship planning resources, and the editor of three hymnals, most recently Sing! A New Creation (2001). She is also Adjunct Professor of Church Music and Worship at Calvin Theological Seminary. Dr. Brink is a frequent consultant, writer, and speaker at conferences across North America and beyond—most recently in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Singapore. Her areas of interest include congregational song from all times and places; psalmody; hymnal editing; and consulting with a wide range of churches on worship renewal issues.

Marguerite Brooks is associate professor of choral conducting at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale School of Music. Professor Brooks was named to the faculty in 1985 to chair Yale’s graduate program in choral conducting and to direct the Institute’s choral activities. She conducts the Yale Camerata and serves as director of music at the Church of the Redeemer (UCC) in New Haven. She has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Amherst College, and was director of choral music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

John Ferguson is the Elliot and Klara Stockdal Johnson Professor of Organ and Church Music and Cantor to the Student Congregation at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. His responsibilities include directing the church music-organ program, teaching organ and conducting the St. Olaf Cantorei. A nationally known composer, clinician, recitalist and hymn festival leader, Dr. Ferguson has made enormous ecumenical contributions to the worship lives of a broad range of congregations.

Rita Ferrone is an independent writer and lecturer on issues of liturgy, catechesis and Christian initiation in the Roman Catholic Church. Her background in parish and diocesan ministry has given her work a practical slant, and made her a much sought-after workshop leader in dioceses throughout the United States.

Thomas Murray is professor of organ at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. Professor Murray has been a member of the faculty since 1981 and was appointed University Organist in 1990. Successor to Charles Krigbaum and Robert Baker as the senior professor of organ, he teaches the organ literature seminar and gives instruction to graduate organ majors. His performing career has taken him to all parts of Europe and to Japan, Australia, and Argentina. He has appeared as a soloist with the Pittsburgh, Houston, Milwaukee, and New Haven symphony orchestras, the National Chamber Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra during its tour of Finland in 1996. The American Guild of Organists named him International Performer of the Year in 1986; as a recipient of this distinction he joined such luminaries as Marie-Claire Alain, Jean Guillou, and Dame Gillian Weir. The Royal College of Organists in England awarded him an FRCO diploma honoris causa in 2003 and in 2007 the Yale School of Music awarded him the Gustave Stoeckel Award for excellence in teaching. During his years at Yale he has at times been active as a choral conductor, and prior to joining the faculty he was organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (Episcopal) in Boston. Professor Murray is Principal Organist and Artist-in-Residence at Christ Church Episcopal in New Haven, where he mentors a current ISM organ major as Organ Scholar.

Don E. Saliers recently retired as William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and Worship and director of the master of sacred music program at Emory University. Dr. Saliers is currently writing on liturgy and theological aesthetics and is a sought after lecturer and clinician in worship, music and congregational life.

Bryan Spinks is Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and Pastoral Theology, and chair of the program in liturgical studies; Fellow of Morse College. Professor Spinks is known internationally for the breadth of his learning. He works on Syriac traditions of liturgy, placing his scholarship in the context of patristics and the early sources of Christian liturgy. A priest of the Church of England, Professor Spinks also works on a range of Reformation topics, with publications on Luther, Calvin, Richard Hooker, and William Perkins. His most recent publications are two volumes on Rituals and Theologies of Baptism (Ashgate 2006) and Liturgy in the Age of Reason: Worship and Sacraments in England and Scotland, 1662–c.1800 (Ashgate 2008). His book The Worship Mall: Liturgical Initiatives and Responses in a Postmodern Global World is to be published in 2010. Before coming to Yale, he taught religious education at St. Peter's Comprehensive School in Huntingdon, and liturgy at the University of Cambridge, where he was also chaplain of Churchill College. He served on the Church of England Liturgical Commission from 1986 to 2000, and was involved in the compilation of Common Worship 2000. He is also president emeritus of the Church Service Society of the Church of Scotland, and was a consultant to the worship committee of the United Reformed Church. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and overseas fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge.

Benjamin Stewart teaches the study and practice of Christian worship at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. While Ben loves reading written accounts of the theology of worship, he is especially interested in studying real-life liturgical participants in the act of constructing theological significance out of actual liturgical events. Ben served as pastor to a small, Appalachian community in Ohio, and as village pastor to Holden Village retreat center in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of Washington. Daily community worship in the wilderness at Holden nurtured in Ben an appreciation of how liturgy and ecology are natural partners: both practices are ways of approaching all things as mysteriously and powerfully held together. Ben is part of Living Liturgy, a team of five worship leaders who lead events across the country on revitalizing congregational worship.