Download or read book Traditional Ritual as Christian Worship written by Burrows, William R. and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A necessary task of missionaries in recent decades has been to help local Christians "inculturate" or "contextualize" their faith, although the criteria for doing so often came from outside the context in which new believers developed their understanding of Christianity. Highlighting the voices of non-Western scholars, this work recognizes the importance of ritual and ceremony in the life of communities that seek to worship God in ways that reflect culturally appropriate responses to Scripture. The contributors -- some of missiology's leading lights -- discuss rituals, beliefs, and practices of diverse peoples, supporting the conclusion that orthodox Christianity is hybrid Christianity.
Download or read book Early Christian Ritual Life written by Richard E. DeMaris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars across many fields have come to realize that ritual is an integral element of human life and a vital aspect of all human societies. Yet, this realization has been slow to develop among scholars of early Christianity. Early Christian Ritual Life attempts to counteract the undervaluing of ritual by placing it at the forefront of early Christian life. Rather than treating ritual in isolation or in a fragmentary way, this book examines early Christian ritual life as a whole. The authors explore an array of Christian ritual activity, employing theory critically and explicitly to make sense of various ritual behaviors and their interconnections. Written by leading experts in their fields, this collection is divided into three parts: • Interacting with the Divine • Group Interactions • Contesting and Creating Ritual Protocols. This book is ideal for religious studies students seeking an introduction to the dynamic research areas of ritual studies and early Christian practice.
Download or read book Myth and Ritual In Christianity written by Alan Watts and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1971-06-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Our main object will be to describe one of the most incomparably beautiful myths that has ever flowered from the mind of man, or from the unconscious processes which shape it and which are in some sense more than man.… This is, furthermore, to be a description and not a history of Christian Mythology.… After description, we shall attempt an interpretation of the myth along the general lines of the philosophia perennis, in order to bring out the truly catholic or universal character of the symbols, and to share the delight of discovering a fountain of wisdom in a realm where so many have long ceased to expect anything but a desert of platitudes.” —from the Prologue
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual written by Risto Uro and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of religion have long assumed that ritual and belief constitute the fundamental building blocks of religious traditions and that these two components of religion are interrelated and interdependent in significant ways. Generations of New Testament and Early Christian scholars have produced detailed analyses of the belief systems of nascent Christian communities, including their ideological and political dimensions, but have by and large ignored ritual as an important element of early Christian religion and as a factor contributing to the rise and the organization of the movement. In recent years, however, scholars of early Christianity have begun to use ritual as an analytical tool for describing and explaining Christian origins and the early history of the movement. Such a development has created a momentum toward producing a more comprehensive volume on the ritual world of Early Christianity employing advances made in the field of ritual studies. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual gives a manifold account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the fifth century. The volume introduces relevant theories and approaches; central topics of ritual life in the cultural world of early Christianity; and important Christian ritual themes and practices in emerging Christian groups and factions.
Download or read book Embodied Liturgy written by Frank C. Senn and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embodied Liturgy marks a “return to the body” in thinking about Christian liturgy and sacramental practice. Rooted in phenomenology and incarnational theology, the book gives primary focus to the body as it considers the prayer offices and the liturgical calendar, sacrifices and sacraments, initiation and vestments, ritual theory and play, word and meal, fasting and feasting, penance and celebration, rites of passage, cultural perspectives, and the role of art, music, dance, and drama in worship. The author invites readers to return to the experience of their own body through guided yogic exercises. As a text for students and liturgical practitioners, the volume gives fresh voice to the experience and practice of worship as bodily acts. Embodied Liturgy is a dynamic, accessible new resource in liturgical and sacramental theology from one of the premiere scholars in the field. Frank C. Senn distills an established legacy of expertise in an innovative and inviting perspective on bodily acts of worship.
Download or read book In Defense of Christian Ritual written by David R Andersen and published by New Reformation Publications. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Christian worship best conceived as a creative, Spirit-fueled experience that any formalized structure necessarily inhibits, or are there any biblical prescriptions around for worship that Christians were meant to follow? In light of recent research from various disciplines-including history, psychology, and New Testament studies - In Defense of Christian Ritual: The Case for a Biblical Pattern of Worship argues the latter. Specifically, this book will demonstrate three things. First, in contrast to the anti-ritualism so prevalent in modern churches, ritual's indispensable role in providing biblically-centered context and content is detailed.Second, contrary to modern opinion, a definite pattern of worship is shown to be present both in our earliest New Testament documents and the early church.Finally, new research will reveal that the assumptions about creativity lying at the heart of modern contemporary worship are fundamentally flawed. Readers will discover that the apostolic teaching embodied in the church's early ritual, as expressed in its liturgy, was never intended to be outdated or rendered irrelevant in light of current fads. It was never meant to be a relic of the ancient past, but a structured way of bringing the "memoirs of the apostles" -that Jesus died for sinners- to God's people in the here and now.
Download or read book Ritual Emotion and Materiality in the Early Christian World written by Soham Al-Suadi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume advances our understanding of early Christianity as a lived religion by approaching it through its rites, the emotions and affects surrounding those rites, and the material setting for the practice of them. The connections between emotions and ritual, between rites and their materiality, and between emotions and their physical manifestation in ancient Mediterranean culture have been inadequately explored as yet, especially with regard to early Christianity and its water and dining rites. Readers will find all three areas—ritual, emotion, and materiality—engaged in this exemplary interdisciplinary study, which provides fresh insights into early Christianity and its world. Ritual, Emotion, and Materiality in the Early Christian World will be of special interest to interdisciplinary-minded researchers, seminarians, and students who are attentive to theory and method, and those with an interest in the New Testament and earliest Christianity. It will also appeal to those working on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman religion, emotion, and ritual from a comparative standpoint.
Download or read book Christian Symbol and Ritual written by Bernard Cooke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his pathbreaking Israel in Egypt James K. Hoffmeier sought to refute the claims of scholars who doubt the historical accuracy of the biblical account of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt. Analyzing a wealth of textual, archaeological, and geographical evidence, he put forth a thorough defenseof the biblical tradition. Hoffmeier now turns his attention to the Wilderness narratives of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. As director of the North Sinai Archaeological Project, Hoffmeier has led several excavations that have uncovered important new evidence supporting the Wilderness narratives,including a major New Kingdom fort at Tell el-Borg that was occupied during the Israelite exodus. Hoffmeier employs these archaeological findings to shed new light on the route of the exodus from Egypt. He also investigates the location of Mount Sinai, and offers a rebuttal to those who have soughtto locate it in northern Arabia and not in the Sinai peninsula as traditionally thought. Hoffmeier addresses how and when the Israelites could have lived in Sinai, as well as whether it would have been possible for Moses to write down the law received at Mount Sinai. Building on the new evidence forthe Israelite sojourn in Egypt, Hoffmeier explores the Egyptian influence on the Wilderness tradition. For example, he finds Egyptian elements in Israelite religious practices, including the use of the tabernacle, and points to a significant number of Egyptian personal names among the generation ofthe exodus. The origin of Israel is a subject of much debate and the wilderness tradition has been marginalized by those who challenge its credibility. In Ancient Israel in Sinai, Hoffmeier brings the Wilderness tradition to the forefront and makes a case for its authenticity based on solid evidenceand intelligent analysis.
Download or read book Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies 1650 1780 written by Nicholas M. Beasley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain’s Caribbean and southern American colonies. Focusing on the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than previously thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists’ attachment to religious continuity was thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness. Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and colonists’ attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves. This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.
Download or read book Kissing Christians written by Michael Philip Penn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-10-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first five centuries of the common era, the kiss was a distinctive and near-ubiquitous marker of Christianity. Although Christians did not invent the kiss—Jewish and pagan literature is filled with references to kisses between lovers, family members, and individuals in relationships of power and subordination—Christians kissed one another in highly specific settings and in ways that set them off from the non-Christian population. Christians kissed each other during prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with greeting, funerals, monastic vows, and martyrdom. As Michael Philip Penn shows in Kissing Christians, this ritual kiss played a key role in defining group membership and strengthening the social bond between the communal body and its individual members. Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of the ritual kiss and how controversies surrounding it became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities and their relations with outsiders. Penn traces how Christian writers exalted those who kissed only fellow Christians, proclaimed that Jews did not have a kiss, prohibited exchanging the kiss with potential heretics, privileged the confessor's kiss, prohibited Christian men and women from kissing each other, and forbade laity from kissing clergy. Kissing Christians also investigates connections between kissing and group cohesion, kissing practices and purity concerns, and how Christian leaders used the motif of the kiss of Judas to examine theological notions of loyalty, unity, forgiveness, hierarchy, and subversion. Exploring connections between bodies, power, and performance, Kissing Christians bridges the gap between cultural and liturgical approaches to antiquity. It breaks significant new ground in its application of literary and sociological theory to liturgical history and will have a profound impact on these fields.
Download or read book Ritual and Christian Beginnings written by Risto Uro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of early Christianity has been examined from a myriad of perspectives, but until recently ritual has been a neglected topic. Ritual and Christian Beginnings: A Socio-Cognitive Analysis argues that ritual theory is indispensable for the study of Christian beginnings. It also makes a strong case for the application of theories and insights from the Cognitive Science of Religion, a field that has established itself as a vigorous movement in Religious Studies over the past two decades. Risto Uro develops a "socio-cognitive" approach to the study of early Christian rituals, seeking to integrate a social-level analysis with findings from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. Ritual and Christian Beginnings provides an overview of how ritual has been approached in previous scholarship, including reasons for its neglect, and introduces the reader to the emerging fields of Ritual Studies and the Cognitive Science of Religion. In particular, it explores the ways in which cognitive theories of ritual can shed new light on issues discussed by early Christian scholars, and opens up new questions and avenues for further research. The socio-cognitive approach to ritual is applied to a number of test cases, including John the Baptist, the ritual healing practiced by Jesus and the early Christians, the social life of Pauline Christianity, and the development of early Christian baptismal practices. The analysis creates building blocks for a new account of Christian beginnings, highlighting the role of ritual innovation, cooperative signalling, and the importance of bodily actions for the generation and transmission of religious knowledge.
Download or read book Ancient Christian Worship written by Andrew B. McGowan and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Important Study on the Worship of the Early Church This introduction to the origins of Christian worship illuminates the importance of ancient liturgical patterns for contemporary Christian practice. Andrew McGowan takes a fresh approach to understanding how Christians came to worship in the distinctive forms still familiar today. Deftly and expertly processing the bewildering complexity of the ancient sources into lucid, fluent exposition, he sets aside common misperceptions to explore the roots of Christian ritual practices--including the Eucharist, baptism, communal prayer, preaching, Scripture reading, and music--in their earliest recoverable settings. Now in paper.
Download or read book Practicing the Faith written by Martin Lindhardt and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decades, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity has arguably become the fastest growing religious movement in the world. Distinguishing features of this variant of Christianity include formal ritual activities as well as informal, experiential, and ecstatic forms of worship. This book examines Pentecostal-charismatic ritual practice in different parts of the world, highlighting, among other things, the crucial role of ritual in creating religious communities and identities.
Download or read book Purity Community and Ritual in Early Christian Literature written by Moshe Blidstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.
Download or read book Brother making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium written by Claudia Rapp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among medieval Christian societies, Byzantium is unique in preserving an ecclesiastical ritual of adelphopoiesis, which pronounces two men, not related by birth, as brothers for life. It has its origin as a spiritual blessing in the monastic world of late antiquity, and it becomes a popular social networking strategy among lay people from the ninth century onwards, even finding application in recent times. Located at the intersection of religion and society, brother-making exemplifies how social practice can become ritualized and subsequently subjected to attempts of ecclesiastical and legal control. Controversially, adelphopoiesis was at the center of a modern debate about the existence of same-sex unions in medieval Europe. This book, the first ever comprehensive history of this unique feature of Byzantine life, argues persuasively that the ecclesiastical ritual to bless a relationship between two men bears no resemblance to marriage. Wide-ranging in its use of sources, from a complete census of the manuscripts containing the ritual of adelphopoiesis to the literature and archaeology of early monasticism, and from the works of hagiographers, historiographers, and legal experts in Byzantium to comparative material in the Latin West and the Slavic world, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium examines the fascinating religious and social features of the ritual, shedding light on little known aspects of Byzantine society.
Download or read book Worship written by Keith Pecklers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Worship, Keith Pecklers aims to gives theologians, liturgists, clergy and laity of all denominations a new sense of the theology of liturgy. From a historical/theological treatment of the evolution of Christian worship in the West, Pecklers addresses 20th century liturgical reforms and emphasizes the liturgy's role in the social and moral transformation of human society. The social dimension of worship is further highlighted in chapters on popular religion and inculturation. He considers the future of Christian worship in light of a new sociological reality: the break up of the stable parish community, credible preaching within an increasingly secularized society, hospitality to those who are often made to feel like pariahs in our assemblies, and the growing rift between conservatives and progressives who share membership in the same church.
Download or read book Rituals in Early Christianity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informed by the paradigmatic shift in ritual and liturgical studies, this volume offers analyses of key ritual traditions in early Christianity. The case studies focus on the dynamic formation and transformation of rituals in the context of Greco-Roman religion, Judaism, and Islam.
