Description
The publication by Benedict XV1 of the motu proprio has put the question of the history and meaning of the liturgy back into centre stage, not just for Catholics but for many Christians as well. Dr Hemming seeks to provide an intelligent background to the Pope’s decision, addressing himself to a number of questions about the nature and character of Catholic worship that opens a wide-ranging historical discussion which will inform and persuade a wide audience. The chapter on liturgy and revelation is the turning point in the book and shows how an understanding of time that is presumed in all modern philosophical thought is challenged by the understanding of divine self-revelation. This is something the young Fr Joseph Ratzinger focussed on early on in his career. This forces us to ask what our relation to liturgical events are and how we experience them. Dr Hemming therefore advocates a `high` theology of the liturgy with the profoundest understanding of the numinous and the mysterium of faith. How will Christian worship change now, asks Dr Hemming in his concluding chapter? He offers a sketch of what may happen in the coming decades and long after the Papacy of Benedict XV1.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The History of Liturgical Reform
2.The Liturgical Movement
3.Liturgy and Revelation
4.Litrugy as Performance
5. Liturgy as an Understanding of Time
Conclusion
Author(s)
Laurence Paul Hemming, Laurence Paul Hemming is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Lancaster University, UK.
Reviews
'An intriguing account of the doctrine of transubstantiation ... Hemming's book is provocative [...] and that is to its benefit. It gets at the root issues of liturgical reform ... It repays several times over having read it and contemplated it.' Antiphon, 2008
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"[An] important and cogently argued book."
Church Times, April 2009
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"a book that must be read and studied and read again by theologians...and indeed by all liturgical practitioners. It will challenge and it will inform"
Reviewed by Alcuin Read in Catholic Herald, 11 July 2008
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" This is a book that must be read and studied and read again. It will challenge and it will inform...this is a book the claims of which must be taken very seriously"
Mass of ages , november 2008, no. 188
Alcuin Reid Doct.,
Reviewed in The Pastoral Review, July/August 2009
Ian Coleman,