I’m nerding out on all things liturgy because, recently, I’ve been answering all kinds of pastoral and practical questions about the Book of Common Prayer from people new to Anglicanism. Talking about the shape of the liturgy is helpful, but Samuel Bray offers a good corrective here about how too much emphasis on the shape of the liturgy opens the door to overly creative liturgical innovations:
And even if the liturgists had naively accepted Dix’s claims about the fourfold action, they might still have kept the prayer book service of Holy Communion essentially intact.[12] And they could certainly have left the rest of the prayer book intact. But that didn’t happen. Dix’s fundamental claim, after all, was not really a historical one—the now thoroughly debunked claim about a universal shape of the primitive eucharist—but a claim about the kind of thing the liturgy is: that it is centrally about a certain set of actions, not a text.[13]
Dix’s idea that liturgy is about a sequence of actions is fundamentally foreign to the prayer book tradition. The BCP 1662 does prescribe some actions—kneeling for Communion, for example, or making the sign of the cross in baptism. But despite the current fad of praising “embodied” worship and the mania for finding meaning in every gesture or ritual act, that is not the general tendency of the prayer book. Compared to what we might expect if we’re thinking in line with The Shape of the Liturgy, the BCP 1662 has relatively few stage directions. What it mostly gives is text.
By contrast, we could think of an ideal Dixian liturgy (not what the man Gregory Dix actually wanted, but rather a logical development of the liturgy-as-shape idea).[14] That ideal might be all stage directions, with the words themselves being left to the players’ improvisation.
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With the end of the semester and the end of my kids’ school year, my reading time has increased. I finished Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. I’m not Dreher’s target audience, because he’s writing for a popular audience and not someone who is reading the same scholars he cites; the question is whether I would recommend this book to those I know who would be in his target audience. I’ve recommended several of his previous books to people (including: The Benedict Option, Live Not By Lies, and Crunchy Cons), but the flaw in this volume is that it is too much an apologetic for converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. I wish he had taken posture similar to that used by Ross Douthat in his recent book on belief.
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Speaking of reading the same scholars that Dreher cites, I’m slowly working my way through Anton Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation. It’s been a challenging, but important, read especially in light of the rapid developments surrounding AI:"
“Technology (and perhaps especially digital technology) is not an independent force, but a framework of practical possibilities by means of which what is needless becomes useful, and by means of which what is useful then becomes necessary for leading a good life. It thereby gives shape to what we care about. It is, as I’ve indicated, a language of expression: not a language in which the world is described, but a language in terms of which the world is enacted — a language in which we read parameters of action, opportunities at hand, what’s choosable and choiceworthy, what’s a matter of convenience, what looks like a good idea at the time, what’s normal, and therefore what’s right” (pg. 71).
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ICYMI: I’ve posted this year’s Summer Reading Challenge for my kids.
What are you reading? Let me know in the comments.