Project Director: Obsculta Preaching Initiative
Areas of Teaching and Research
Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D. teaches in the area of Liturgical Studies and the History of Christianity.
Biography
Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., is a pastoral liturgist and American Catholic historian, serving as Project Director for the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s Liturgical Studies program, Harmon’s research focuses on American Catholic liturgical renewal in the twentieth century. She has contributed over a dozen articles and chapters to the fields of both liturgical studies and American Catholicism, and writes for a number of pastoral resources. She is the author of There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-1959 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013) and Mary and the Liturgical Year: A Pastoral Resource (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2023), which received Third Place at the Association of Catholic Publishers 2024 Awards for best theology book. Harmon co-edits the blog, Pray Tell: Worship, Wit and Wisdom, and has served as a pastoral musician for more than twenty-five years in Roman Catholic parishes and in Lutheran, Anglican, and Disciples of Christ congregations. She resides in St. Joseph, MN, with her husband and two children.
Select Publications
- “Liturgical Movement,” in Cambridge Companion to Liturgy, edited by Joris Geldhof (New York: Oxford UP, forthcoming)
- “The Smallest Members of the Mystical Body: the Role of Children in the Liturgical Movement,” in Contours of Wonder: Childhood and the Liturgical Imagination, edited by Timothy Brunk, Christy Lang Hearlson, and Timothy O’Malley (forthcoming)
- “Our Lady of the Liturgical Movement? Rejecting and Reclaiming Marian Devotion by American Catholic Lay Women,” in Recovering their Stories: U.S. Catholic Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Sandra Yocum and Nicholas Rademacher (New York: Fordham UP, 2024): 116-138.
- Mary and the Liturgical Year: A Pastoral Resource (Chicago, IL: Liturgy Training Publications, 2023).
- “Guitar-totin’ Nuns and Hand-clappin’ Love Songs”: How the Implementation of the Vernacular Transformed American Catholic Church Music,” U.S. Catholic Historian, (Summer, 2021).
Research interests
- 20th-century liturgical renewal and reform
- U.S. Catholic history
- Liturgy and spirituality
- Pastoral theology and liturgical studies
- Women religious