Liturgy

About: Liturgy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4067 publications have been published within this topic receiving 28274 citations. The topic is also known as: Liturgies.

Medical talk and medical work : the liturgy of the clinic

Abstract: Introduction Work among the Haematologists The Sociological Construction of Medicine The Production of Medical Knowledge Reading the Body Constructing Cases Voicing Opinion Voices of Medicine Conclusion

The mystical mind: probing the biology of religious experience

Abstract: How does the mind experience the sacred? What biological mechanisms are involved in mystical states and trances? Is there a neurological basis for patterns in comparative religions? Does religion have an evolutionary function? This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building on an explanation of the basic structure of the brain, the authors focus on parts most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition. On this basis, they plot how the brain is involved in mystical experiences. Successive chapters apply this scheme to mythmaking, ritual and liturgy, meditation, near-death experiences, and theology itself. Anchored in such research, the authors also sketch the implications of their work for philosophy, science, theology, and the future of religion.

The shape of the liturgy

Abstract: A new edition of Gregory Dix's masterpiece, still essenytial reading for students and scholars and in print constantly for fifty years. Dom Gregory Dix's classic account of the development of the Eucharist rite continues to be the definitive and authoritative work on the subject. He presents his massive scholarship in lively and non technical language for all who wish to understand their worship in terms of the framework from which it has evolved. He demonstrates the creative force of Christianity over the centuries through liturgy and the societies it has moulded. His great work has for nearly fifty years regularly been quoted for its devotional as well as its historical value, and has regularly attracted new readers. In this book for the first time, critical studies in the learned periodicals of many countries have been carefully sifted and the results arranged to give a clear picture of the development of the Eucharistic rite.

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

Abstract: Desinng the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. By James K. A. Smith. Cultural Liturgies series, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009. 238 pp. $21.99 (paper). It may be an understatement to say that Anglicans do not look first to the Reformed tradition for insight and edification in regard to liturgical theology and proposals for liturgical renewal. In fact this book - exceptional in every sense of the word - was not even slated for review in this journal until, in the midst of an engaged reading, I successfully appealed to the editor for a hearing. The author is a Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Congregational and Ministry Studies of Calvin College, an increasingly significant center in the aforementioned tradition for liturgical studies and renewal of worship. Smith projects three volumes in this Cultural Liturgies series. Of this first he says, "The genesis of the project was a desire to communicate to students (and faculty) a vision of what authentic, integral Christian learning looks like, emphasizing how learning is connected to worship and how, together, these constitute practices of formation and discipleship. Instead of focusing on what Christians think, distilling Christian faith into an intellectual summary formula ( a 'worldview'), this book focuses on what Christians do, articulating the shape of a Christian 'social imaginary' as it is embedded in the practices of Christian worship" (p. 11). This work is seen, then, as laying the foundation for a second piece centered on philosophical anthropology and a third volume addressing current debates in political theology. At least three things stand out in regard to this first volume: a newold reconstruction of anthropology, the eschatological focus at the center of Smith's argument, and his creative juxtaposition of the classic elements of Christian worship to the subtle and not so subtle liturgies of mall (the consumer culture), nation (the sports / military culture), and university (a culture producing self-consistent worldviews that are nonetheless disparate). All these compete for our ultimate allegiances in one way or another - sometimes congruent, sometimes not. Smith brings a wide range of scholarship and insight to bear in trenchant analyses of these other liturgical constructions that promise salvation in one way or another. In regard to anthropology, the thesis is advanced that human beings are not primarily thinking or believing beings, but only secondarily so. What is first is desire. With humans as first and foremost desiring creatures, the questions surrounding the ordering of our precognitive and prereflective loves are paramount. In other words, he investigates those seminal practices that willy nilly form us into some vision of human flourishing (the kingdom). It is the dimensions of such kingdoms ("social imaginaries" rather than "worldviews") that give both metaphorical and literal direction to our choices in life. In some ways this is, for Christians at least, as old as Augustine, as lasting as Dante's effoliation of it, and as recent as Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, but it is given fresh and significant exegesis and application by Smith. The argument of the volume is set forth in two parts of three chapters each, following an extensive introduction that is focused on (1) the phenomenology of cultural liturgies; (2) a restatement of the necessary but often unperceived relationship between education and worship; and (3) a consideration of the elements for a theology of culture (with a focus on pedagogy, liturgy, and ecclesia). …

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity: Enactments of meaning

Abstract: The complex relationship between the self-referential and the canonical streams of ritual's messages is best approached through further exploration of the relationship between saying and doing. After a preliminary discussion of general principles of efficacy we will consider a crucial indexical message, intrinsic to ritual's very form, alluded to at the end of the second chapter, in the absence of which the canon would be inconsequential. We approach here what I understand to be ritual's fundamental office and will discuss in this light the establishment of convention in ritual and the social contract and morality that inheres in it. These observations provide grounds for taking ritual to be humanity's basic social act. At the end of the last chapter I argued that participation in rituals might not only indicate aspects of performers' contemporary states but impose transforming decisions on those states. A clumsy bit of sleight-of-hand may seem to be poorly hidden in that argument. To claim on the one hand that supercision, for example, indicates the achievement of a certain stage in a boy's maturation and, on the other, that it imposes a dichotomous decision on that process, may seem either ingenuously confused or disingenuously confusing. To indicate a condition would be one thing, to transform it another. The two, however, are not being confused. They are being conflated. Some, if not most, of the self-referential messages occurring in ritual do not merely “say something” about the state of the performer.