Reflections on the theological aspect of the liturgy was the focus of Alexander Schmemann's intellectual life. He intuitively grasped and insisted upon the essentially theological character of all liturgical renewal. He recognized that the renewal of the church requires a rediscovery of the liturgy's own inherent theology, that same theology which once informed the whole of the church's life as well as the teachings and writings of the leaders of the Patristic age. This theological content which is inherent in the liturgy itself is designed by Schmemann as liturgical theology.
What it means to be a man or a woman is questioned today like never before. While traditional gender roles have been eroding for decades, now the very categories of male and female are being discarded with reckless abandon. How does one act like a gentleman in such confusing times? The Catholic Gentleman is a solid and practical guide to virtuous manhood. It turns to the timeless wisdom of the Catholic Church to answer the important questions men are currently asking. In short, easy- to-read chapters, the author offers pithy insights on a variety of topics, including • How to know you are an authentic man • Why our bodies matter • The value of tradition • The purpose of courtesy • What real holiness is and how to achieve it • How to deal with failure in the spiritual life
Worship is at the heart of the Christian faith. This applies equally to all denominations. For that reason it is all the more important that the ordering of worship and its place in the life of the church is regularly rewritten and reinterpreted. This volume--based on the third, completely revised German edition from 2013 by two of the foremost liturgical scholars in Germany--offers a contemporary, comprehensive introduction to the foundations for the study of liturgy today, one from which scholars and students in the English-speaking world can also profit. Beyond appealing to students of liturgy and theology, this book reaches out to everyone who wants to know more about the liturgical essence and dimensions of the church.
"A new edition of Gregory Dix's masterpiece, still essential 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."--
This work attends to the organic process by which the Roman rite was built up from its foundations into a magnificent structure, marked by the accumulated riches of each age through which it passed, and characterized by order, beauty, and piety in its texts, gestures, rubrics, chants, and calendar-from the major elements to minute details.
This book examines the historical development of the blessing of waters and its theology in the East, with an emphasis on the Byzantine tradition. Exploring how Eastern Christians have sought these waters as a source of healing, purification, and communion with God, Denysenko unpacks their euchology and ritual context. The history and theology of the blessing of waters on Epiphany is informative for contemporary theologians, historians, pastors and students. Offering important insights into how Christians renew Baptism in receiving the blessed waters, this book also proposes new perspectives for theologizing Christian stewardship of ecology in the modern era based on a patristic liturgical synthesis. Denysenko presents an alternative framework for understanding the activity of the Trinity, enabling readers to encounter a vision of how participants encounter God in and after ritual.
When Benedict XVI reestablished the celebration of the older Latin Mass, voices of protest rose up from many sides. This book explains the motives behind the Pope's decision to allow two forms of the Mass by turning to the Pope's own theological and liturgical writings and also draws on the author's experiences on various Church commissions and in offices of the Roman Curia. The author also brings to his subject an astute understanding of current social and spiritual trends both inside and outside the Church. Sensitive to modern man's hunger for the sacred, he desires with Pope Benedict XVI that the Mass be first and foremost a place of encounter with the living God. --Publisher.
Sonic Liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition builds on the foundation of Guy L. Beck's earlier work, which described the theoretical role of sound in Hindu thought. Sonic Liturgy continues the discussion of sound into the realm of Hindu ritual and musical traditions of worship. Beginning with the chanting of the Sama-Veda alongside the fire sacrifices of the ancient Indo-Aryans and with the classical Gandharva music as outlined in the musicological texts of Bharata and Dattila, Beck establishes a historical foundation for an in-depth understanding of the role of music in the early Puja rituals and Indian theater in the vernacular poetry of the Bhakti movements in medieval temple worship of Siva and Vishnu in southern India, and later in the worship of Krishna in the northern Braj region. By surveying a multitude of worship traditions, Beck reveals a continuous template of interwoven ritual and music in Hindu tradition that he terms "sonic liturgy," a structure of religious worship and experience that incorporates sound and music on many levels. In developing the concept and methods for understanding the phenomenon of sonic liturgy, Beck draws from liturgical studies and ritual studies, broadening the dimensions of each, as well as from recent work in the fields of Indian religion and music. As he maps the evolution of sonic liturgy in Hindu culture, Beck shows how, parallel to the development of religious ritual from ancient times to the present, there is a less understood progression of musical form, beginning with Vedic chants of two to three notes to complicated genres of devotional temple music employing ragas with up to a dozen notes. Sonic liturgy in its maturity is manifest as a complex interactive worship experience of the Vaishnava sects, presented here in Beck's final chapters.
The author has tried to define liturgical theology, noting especially its progress beyond liturgics, the study and comparison of texts, and showing how the dynamic realism of the Eucharistic liturgy has been often obscured in popular liturgical piety. These themes are developed in reference to the Ordo or shape of worship as it evolved in the Orthodox Church, from the very earliest years down to the 'crystallization' of worship in Byzantine Orthodoxy in the ninth-twelfth centuries.
Against contemporary trends that conceive of Christian worship primarily as entertainment or sheer celebration, Walter Sundberg argues that repentance is the heart of authentic worship. In Worship as Repentance Sundberg outlines the history of repentance and confession within liturgical practice from the early church to mid-twentieth-century Protestantism, advocating movement away from the "eucharistic piety" common in mainline worship today and toward the "penitential piety" of older traditions of Protestant worship.
