Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and remarkably complex form of human activity. This book opens with a discussion of the nature of liturgical activity and then explores various dimensions of such activity. Over the past fifty years there has been a remarkable surge of interest, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, in philosophy of religion. Most of what has been written by participants in this movement deals with one or another aspect of religious belief. Yet for most adherents of most religions, participation in the liturgies and rituals of their religion is at least as important as what they believe. One of the aims of this book is to call the attention of philosophers of religion to the importance of religious practice and to demonstrate how rich a topic this is for philosophical reflection. Another aim is to show liturgical scholars who are not philosophers that a philosophical approach to liturgy casts an illuminating light on the topic that supplements their own approach. Insofar as philosophers have written about liturgy, they have focused most of their attention on its formative and expressive functions. This book focuses instead on understanding what liturgical agents actually do. It is what they do that functions formatively or expressively. What they do is basic.
Introduction PART ONE: LITURGY, ENACTMENTS, AND SCRIPTS 1: What is Liturgy? 2: On Following a Liturgical Script 3: With One Accord: The Communal Dimension of Liturgical Enactments 4: On Bended Knee: the Bodily Dimension of Liturgical Enactments 5: What Are Those without Faith Doing in Liturgical Enactments? PART TWO: LITURGY AND SCRIPTURE 6: On the Liturgical Reading and Singing of Scripture 7: Liturgical Repetition and Reenactment 8: Liturgical Commemoration 9: The Liturgical Present Tense PART THREE: GOD IN THE LITURGY 10: God's Liturgical Activity 11: Does God Know What We Say to God? PART FOUR: LITURGY, LOVE, AND JUSTICE 12: Liturgical Love 13: Justice and Injustice in Christian Liturgies
Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University. He is the author thirty books, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and former president of the American Philosophical Association.
Reviews for Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice
Philosophers of religion have classically engaged with topics such as God's existence and attributes, the problem of evil, and the question of miracles. Ritual, in contrast, has often been viewed as the preserve of religious studies scholars. In this dense but thoughtful collection based on work produced over several decades, Nicholas Wolterstorff corrects both of these assumptions by bringing strictly philosophical tools to bear on Christian liturgy. The Yale philosophical theologian attends to actions and texts, and in so doing endorses the turns to religious experience and to language that characterize contemporary philosophy of religion. * David Grumett, Ecclesiology * Review from previous edition This book is provocative, instructive, and should achieve the author's intention of catalyzing a new research program ... Acting Liturgically will be an essential guide * James M. Arcadi, Reading Religion *
