Grant White: Liturgy and the Finnish Forest

Dr Grant White studied at Harvard, Notre Dame, Oxford - focusing in areas related to Liturgy — which of course brings together arts, faith, ritual, and so much of what we care about. He has taught in the US, in England, and Finland, and now in Sweden — where he is senior lecturer in Eastern Christian Studies at the Sankt Ignatios College and the Stockholm School of Theology. Grant taught hybrid courses in the D.Min. and master’s degree programs at St. Vladimir’s Seminary and courses in art and spirituality at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. He also served as Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK.

His scholarly and teaching work revolve around the question of the roles and functions of liturgical practices in the construction of meaning in late modernity. As such, his research and teaching embrace a range of disciplines from comparative liturgy to ritual studies, church history, history of theology, hermeneutics, history of ideas, aesthetics, and art history. He is interested in studying how Orthodox liturgical traditions are enacted in our own day, and in the questions such contemporary celebrations raise around the issues of tradition, continuity and change, Christian formation, and Christian identity. He is also interested in the roles of liturgy in contemporary ecumenical dialogue.

Grant White is many things — certainly very learned, but also very much a teacher and a deep listener, reaching people’s lives and finding them where they are. And this makes his academic study all the more rich and real. Grant is also himself an artist: an extraordinary photographer whose work, drawing on the Finnish forests near his home, consistently exudes light and wonder, a testimony to his acute “listening” to the world. It is, in a word, Luminous. Check out his Instagram, excerpted below.