Limits and Possibilities of Sharing Christian Worship in an Interreligious Educational Setting

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-223
Author(s):  
Jennifer Peace
Keyword(s):  
Planning Process ◽  
Leadership Education ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Worship Service ◽  
Theological School ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Interreligious Education

This paper discusses a worship service I designed and led in November of 2014 at Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS). As a member of the faculty, a practicing Christian and a religious educator and interfaith organizer, I am invited to lead a service each year in the Chapel at ANTS. In particular, as the ANTS’ co-director of the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE), a joint program between ANTS and Hebrew College, I was charged with making the service an “interfaith” gathering, open and inviting for Unitarian Universalist, Muslim, and Jewish guests, while still providing an authentic expression of Christian worship. This article offers a first-person narrative and thick description of the service, the planning process, the broader context of interreligious education at our schools, and reflections on both the possibilities and limits of sharing particular religious rituals across diverse religious traditions for educational purposes. Drawing on the work of interreligious educators I identify a set of goals for interreligious education and explore the potential for religious ritual to both contribute to and complicate these goals. I describe the worship service as a ritual event in the life of a Christian seminary as well as its meaning and role in the process of interreligious coformation that is part of CIRCLE’s work.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Brian Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistic ◽  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
It Use ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Common Prayer

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer requires many approaches: historical, linguistic, theological, ethical, political, literary. Apart from two brief interludes, it was England’s official book of Christian worship from 1549 to 2000. The British Empire imposed it use on peoples all over the globe, and it became translated into nearly 200 languages and dialects. The Introduction explains that one way of understanding the Book of Common Prayer is as an example of liturgy—a set form of words and gestures in a religious ritual. However, it is also a carrier of national identity, bringing politics and religion together. It also considers whether the Book of Common Prayer at heart is Catholic or Protestant.

Guest Column—Epilogue: Celebrity's Face Book

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 1131-1139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wicke
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Heaven And Earth

Celebrity relies on a gaze, a collective or public regard that, in gazing, confers value. Celebrity also demands a face to celebrate—faciality is a sine qua non of “celebrification.” The historian Peter Brown demonstrates in The Cult of the Saints that late antiquity introduced the overriding importance of saints' images, bodies, relics, or tomb sites in a Christian worship that emphasized the mediation of saints between heaven and earth and in place of angels; celebrity had its origins in the woodcut portraits and wayside shrines that proliferated as well as in the professionally wrought iconic images of the saints. Against David Hume's judgment of this phenomenon as “vulgar” and a remnant of pagan folk religion, he argues that the rise of the cult of the saints was as influenced by elites, including Augustine, as by supposedly lesser folk, and that the latter, especially women and the poor, were thus able to participate in a democratizing of culture profoundly indebted to graveside practices that promoted personal relationships, even friendships, with the dead saints and the circulation of their faces in imagery and their body parts as relics (17). Moreover, far from introducing vulgarity into Christian rituals, Brown shows how the cult was imbued with the culture of classical antiquity and with values associated with Athenian democracy and the philosophy of nous, a non-rational intelligence linking us to the divine (48). That we deploy the term celebrity icon for such figures as Oprah or Angelina Jolie only underscores the vestiges of public religious ritual that remain embedded in celebrity practices and the nimbus of the sacred that haloes even seemingly debased celebrity discourses.

scholarly journals Regional Features of Some Traditions and Customs in Modern Islam

REGIONOLOGY ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-321
Author(s):  
Maxim Yu. Bareev ◽  
Ruslan R. Agishev
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Regional Features ◽  
Cultural Diffusion ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Muslim Culture ◽  
Ritual Practices

Introduction. The relevance of the issues raised is due to the contradictory nature of the evolution of religious and pseudo-religious rites of Muslims, as well as the ambiguous attitude towards them from the Muslim Ummah of the region. The objective of the study is to explore the regional features of some religious and ethnic cult practices of Muslims residing in the Republic of Mordovia. Materials and Methods. The study considered such materials as the data of the sociological survey “Muslim Traditions and Rites of the Tatars in a Region” employing the method of semi-formalized interviews (47 people), which assessed the level and the intensity of religiosity. The content and specificity of the rites, religious and ethnic rituals were analyzed. The canonicity of the rituals was assessed. Results. Various religious traditions and rites having regional specifics and observed by Muslims in the Republic of Mordovia have been analyzed. These include: a Dua prayer performed over water, the rite of ‘iskyat’, cult of Wali, the rite of ‘bashkoda’ preceding a marriage, and a memorial rite for deceased. An analysis of the religious ritual practices of Muslims in the Republic of Mordovia has made it possible to ascertain the presence of elements of cultural diffusion in some religious practices. Discussion and Conclusion. Despite certain disagreement regarding the performance of a number of religious rites within the regional Muslim Ummah, most of the considered forms of religious life in the minds of people are inseparable from the Muslim tradition and are perceived as part of the original Muslim culture. The materials of the article will be useful for the authorities to improve the regional ethno-confessional policy.

A Study in Repetition and Revival

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-231
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Christian Tragedy

This chapter offers close readings of a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century play-scripts about the murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, including works by Douglas Jerrold, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Alfred Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Tracing their performance over 100 years involves the exploration of changing attitudes to the performance of Christian worship and sacrifice on stage and, more broadly, the changing status of the Established Church itself. In the repetitions and variations of Becket’s narrative deployed over time, we can chart changes in the idea of Christian tragedy, renewed appreciation of the communal significance of religious ritual, especially in the revival of the classical chorus, and a growing sense that sacred drama was not just an aberration to be carefully policed and perhaps suppressed, but part of the living fabric of English national drama with a performative future as well as a past.

Ritual, Religion, and Violence

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candace S. Alcorta ◽  
Richard Sosis
Keyword(s):  
Religious Violence ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Efficient Tool ◽  
Evolutionary Mechanisms ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Group Cooperation ◽  
Early Human

This chapter, which discusses the association between religion and violence, also addresses why suicide terrorists are willing to offer their lives for their life-affirming religions. Religious violence and “sacred pain” have long been significant components in the mythology and ritual of Western religious traditions. Religious rituals differ widely across cultures. Music intensifies the ritual experience itself, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary and laying the foundation for creation of the sacred. Religious ritual is an efficient tool for altering group cooperation and cohesion. The evolution of religion is closely linked with the emergence of large social groups in early human populations. It can be stated that understanding both the proximate and evolutionary mechanisms which link religion and violence is an important first step in understanding, and hopefully eradicating, the religious violence that has become so prevalent in the modern world.

Constructionism and Its Critics

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kloos
Keyword(s):  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Loss And Grief ◽  
Human Emotions ◽  
Personal Formation

Since the 1970s, social scientists increasingly have cast human emotions in the arenas of culturally or linguistically constructed expression. A wide spectrum of theoretical terminology has been employed, including “constructionism” and “constructivist.” This essay reviews constructionist theories that bear on the study of religion and emotion. It analyzes constructionist theories as both determinist and relativist. It focuses on the recent historical ethnographic work of an important anthropologist of emotion, William M. Reddy. It also examines how religious emotions get constructed and what forms serve to give them expression. Generally, religious ritual is a form that can function in such a way so that the emotional lows of loss and grief are made less low. Conversely, ritual can heighten the feelings of joy and happiness at times of celebration. The construction of ritual form reflects specific religious traditions, yet cultures also share more broadly emotional forms for handling death, birth, marriage, and personal formation.

scholarly journals Music and Religion in the First World War

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 465-475
Author(s):  
Stuart Mews
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
First World ◽  
Music And Religion

Listening to instrumental music has really become the only form of worship which is still possible to us.’ These words, said to have / been uttered by a distinguished Oxford philosopher, were quoted by Hastings Rashdall, then an Oxford theologian but later Dean of Carlisle, when he preached in Hereford Cathedral in connection with the Three Choirs Festival in 1912.’ Rashdall rejected the substitution of aesthetic appreciation in the concert hall for Christian worship because, he contended, it did not evoke any practical response. That he should have felt it necessary to stress this difference was in itself evidence of the strength of the view he was repudiating. It was also a significant comment on the secularization of the English academic profession and perhaps of a wider section of the middle class. It is a reminder, too, of suggestions made by scholars of history, sociology, and anthropology that there are significant connections and similarities between the development and social functions of music and religion. H. G. Koenigsberger has argued that the decline of religion left an emotional void in Western Europe which came increasingly to be filled primarily by music. David Martin points out that both music and religion serve similar purposes, ‘such as orgiastic stimulation, group solidarity, martial sentiment’. J. S. Eades begins with the view that both ‘artistic performance and religious ritual may be symbolic expressions of solidarities which can be used for political ends.’

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