A Curricular Experiment in Sacramental Edification and Instruction

Abstract

AbstractPhenomenology enriches our awareness of the robust relationship between the appearances of things and those things in themselves. Through this modern philosophical tool, the manner of appearance of things is discov- ered to have an ontological density often ignored if not denied prior to the work of Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century. According to Robert Sokolowski ‘manifestation in all its forms is a dimension of being’ (Eucharistic Presence, p. 32): in other words, the appearance of a thing is an aspect of the being of the thing itself. Such observations bear strikingly on the field of liturgical theology, inasmuch as formal worship constitutes both a funda- mental moral action and at the same time a set of what might be called aesthetic gestures or acts, often evaluated in terms of solemnity, beauty, simplicity vs. elaborateness, and the like. Applied to worship, then, phenom- enology keeps both of these aspects in play. Another benefit of the phenom- enological approach is its power...