Ruth Meyers
Senior Research Scholar
I am passionate about the power of worship to form and transform communities of faith. I chose liturgy as my primary academic discipline because I believed that studying worship would give me a window into what individuals and communities in different times and places believed about God. My doctoral work, a study of the development of the rites of baptism and confirmation in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, gave me an opportunity to explore the history of the Episcopal Church in the twentieth century. Serving as Chair of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (2010-2015) and as a member of Task Force on the Study of Marriage (2016-2018) led me into study of the history and theology of marriage in Christianity. My current research, a study of worship in racially diverse congregations in the Episcopal Church, builds on my earlier research on worship and mission and my interest in liturgical inculturation.
PhD, University of Notre Dame, 1992
MA, University of Notre Dame, 1989
MDiv, Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1985
- Liturgical theology and missiology
- Christian initiation
- Worship in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion
- Liturgical year
- Inculturation of the liturgy
- Theology and rituals of marriage
- The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Common Prayer, Oxford University Press, 2025 (forthcoming): editor, with Paul F. Bradshaw and Luiz Carlos Teixeira Coelho
- Praying Shapes Believing. Revised edition of Leonel Mitchell’s 1985 theological study of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Church Publishing, Inc., 2016
- Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission, Eerdmans, 2014
- “Christian Initiation,” in T & T Clark Companion to Sacraments and Sacramentality, edited by James Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish (T & T Clark, 2023), 157-74
- “Language in Our Common Prayer,” in “Jubilate: A Conversation about Prayer Book Revision and the Language of Our Prayer,” with Katherine Sonderegger, Anglican Theological Review 103 (February 2021): 6-18
- “Christian Marriage and Funeral Services as Rites of Passage,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2016 http://religion.oxfordre.com/