Liturgical Order Research Articles

Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts. By Reta Halteman Finger

Pp. x, 326 , Grand Rapids , Eerdmans , 2007 , $115.00. This book studies commensality, principally though not exclusively in the church of Jerusalem as reflected in the early chapters of Acts, and raises particular questions about the role therein of women, and especially of widows. Finger argues that common meals were an integral and essential aspect of early Christian life, in continuity with the table fellowship shared by Jesus not only with his disciples but also with others, including those deemed to be outcasts of society. While this may seem in many ways non-controversial, she challenges the findings of previous scholarship in its reconstruction of early Christian life, and she poses a significant challenge to the Church today. Finger argues that community of goods was fundamental to early Christian life. Notwithstanding the eschatological orientation of the early Church, this was not an interim or short-sighted arrangement which precipitated the poverty of the Jerusalem church by the middle years of the first century. Poverty was quotidian reality, with or without community of goods, for the overwhelming majority in the ancient world. Eschatological expectations were not cataclysmic, and there was every expectation that the Church would have to endure in the longer term. She accordingly intimates, but perhaps does not discuss in adequate detail, that the alienation of property, reflected in different ways in the examples of Barnabas and of Ananias and Sapphira, was not undertaken without regard to the long-term viability of the community. A partial corollary of the centrality of commensality to early Christian life is that the Eucharist cannot be separated from table fellowship. In arguing this point, Finger would have benefited from interaction with recent liturgical scholarship. This would have been helpful not only for her reconstruction of early Christian ritual and communal life, but also for her arguments about Christian fellowship today. In her treatment of Acts 6:1–6, Finger criticises the assumption that the Hellenist widows mentioned were neglected recipients of food dispensed by the Jerusalem church to its most needy members. She notes that, in ancient Mediterranean culture, as in many other societies, the preparation of food, and the management of domestic space generally, are the sphere of women, and that housekeeping is an important aspect of women's power. She argues accordingly that the widows in question are members of the church who are not given their proper share in the ministry of preparing and distributing food for community meals. She suggests that the language barrier may have hindered the participation of women who spoke only Greek, when perhaps the majority, and certainly the dominant group, within the Jerusalem church spoke Aramaic. The argument could perhaps have been strengthened with the observation that men, who entered and were active in public space, were more likely to have been bilingual than women, whose activities for the most part were confined to private space. This could have accounted for what remains a weak point in her argument, viz. explaining why the apostles' response to the crisis was to call for the nomination of male members of the community to address the problem. Finger could have strengthened her argument by observing that only widows are mentioned as being neglected, and not orphans, the other paradigmatic weak and marginalised members of society. This could suggest that it is indeed the potential contribution of the widows, rather than their need, which is at issue. For many readers, this book may be challenging rather than persuasive. But the challenges both to the historical reconstruction of Christian origins and to Christian life today need to be addressed. Finger implies, if indeed she does not assert, that the liturgical life of the Church has deviated from its ancient and essential ideal in separating the Eucharist from commensality, and in particular from inclusive table fellowship which embraces the poor and the outcast. This will be an uncomfortable challenge to those coming from traditions to which liturgical order is central. But equally it needs to be questioned whether the Church has ever been free of the tension between ritual observance and the social imperatives of faith which may fundamentally undermine it. This is a significant work, and one worthy of careful study, but also of robust and detailed interaction. Readers of all scholarly and ecclesiastical persuasions will be challenged and enriched.

How Should We Read Hebrew Bible Ritual Texts? A Ritualistic Reading of The Law of the Nazirite (Num 6,1–21)

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to propose a ritualistic reading of Old Testament ritual texts based on the theory of Roy A. Rappaport.2 One of Rappaport's more or less overlooked views is that in order to be able to “understand” a certain ritual, one will have to become acquainted with this ritual's liturgical orders, its encoded message. In other words to understand a ritual it is necessary in some way to be informed of this ritual's particular worldview. 2. Rappaport's ritual theory as it is expressed in Rappaport's major work, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). As I focus on the ritual texts of the so called P material in the Pentateuch, and in particular on the law of the Nazirite in Numbers 6,1–21, I use this notion of Rappaport's as a hermeneutical key to the reading of the ritual texts. It is my claim that when we try to answer the questions posed by a ritual text, if we limit our search to the worldview of the ritual in question, we will not only be using an approach which is methodologically sound and appropriate, we will also receive better answers.

‘Gimme de kneebone bent’: Liturgics, Dance, Resistance and a Hermeneutics of the Knees

Shall we all dance to the Lord? But what Lord? To whose Lord shall we bend our knees in prayer, honour, dance and praise? Can our knees be naked? Can we open our legs? How much skin can we show without apologizing? Are we allowed to get the sensuous fever while dancing a tango, a salsa, or a samba? How should our knees behave in the house of the Lord? And whose house is God's house? Is there a proper way to dance in a worship service? What parts of our bodies can we move without distressing the proper liturgical order rooted in respect, faith, rationality, tradition and good manners?Our knees connect liturgy with ecclesiology, theology, colonialisation, dance and bodies. I was asked to write about dance in Brazil/Latin America, perhaps because Brazil is well known for its dancing spirit, as one can see in our carnival, samba, joy and beautiful women. All of that is true. But the task for this article was more specific. I had to write about dance within Christian communities. Then, the whole aspect of dance was turned upside down in my head. In truth, we do not dance in historic Protestant churches in Brazil and in that regard, we do not differ one inch from many of our brothers and sisters in Edinburgh, Rome, Geneva or the United States – at least when dance is concerned. We just do not dance. Only our Pentecostal brothers and sisters can dance.

Die Psalmboek van 2003 as bron van liturgiese verryking

The Psalmbook of 2003 as a source of liturgical enrichment The aim of this article is to bring to view some liturgical possi- bilities made available through the Psalmbook of 2003. One of the objectives of this intensively revised volume was to expand and enrich the liturgy through congregational singing. New psalm melodies, newly-versified Scriptures set to well-known tunes, as well as psalms set to favourite “Liederwysies”, will contribute to a newly-illuminated metalanguage of liturgical song. All examples of songs for the different elements of the liturgy are mainly proposed to serve as a starting point for further creative development. Psalms and Scriptural versifications are suggested for suitable liturgical responses. Especially targeted are liturgical elements where the liturgist speaks on behalf of the congregation. In these instances a selection of songs is given which congregations could utilise as part of an active liturgical dialogue instead of being passive audiences. This article could also serve as a reference document for or- ganists and liturgists when planning a church service. To en- hance user-friendly utilisation as well as creativity, a variety of liturgical possibilites are presented according to the commonly used liturgical order of reformed church services.

“Bulls cut down bellowing”

Using Rappaport’s notion of liturgical orders, the essay argues that the fixity of features in some ritual scenes in the Iliad may denote a high communicational register and level of sanctity. The features of commensal and oath-sacrificing scenes are compared and contrasted – death is highlighted in oath-sacrifice, muffled in commensal sacrifice. There is a relative paucity of figurative language in ritual scenes, except in the case of the “pitiless bronze” which takes the life of the lambs and boar in the oath-sacrifices of Books III and XIX. This figurative paucity is to be contrasted to the plenum of such language in scenes which depict battlefield killings. Finally the features of the cremation sacrifices of Iliad XXIII are examined against those of commensal and oath-sacrifices. The focalization on the “bulls cut down bellowing” in the precremation feast is startling because it jars with typical commensal sacrifices, but may be explained by the broken nature of the narrative and its punctuation by an oath-making ritual leitmotif. In contrast, the actual cremation sacrifices are situated within a strongly formalized liturgical order which does not permit focalization on dying victims, despite the references to poinē which introduce and conclude the funeral sacrifices.

Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candombl�

Dancing religions of the Afro-Americas Body knowledge at the crossroads Days of remembrance Dances of memory Praise dance and liturgical orders Informal learning with Haitian Laws Informal learning with Bahian Orichas Formal learning with Cuban Orichas The dancing body and its social medicine

The Kōan as Ritual Performance

Study of the Zen koan tradition has been dominated by psychological and textual methods and theories. But koans not only constitute a literary genre, they are part of the liturgical order of Zen Buddhism. In this article I argue that psychological and textual approaches offer a limited understanding of the ritual and performative contexts of koan practice and, drawing on ritual and performance theory, develop an alternative approach to the koan tradition.

Landscapes of the Ghost Dance: A Cartography of Numic Ritual

Recent historical and ethnographic research indicates that the study of ritual behavior could be greatly enhanced by combining parameters of place and landscape use with interpretation of material culture. This strategy is especially useful for identifying the archaeological record of ritual among societies that incorporated topographic features and natural resources into their liturgical order. In this article we apply a behavioral framework to the study of Numic ritual technologies. By intergrating ethnographic and historic data on the geography, practice, and material culture of the nineteenth-century Nevada Ghost Dance, we demonstrate how this framework helps to determine the configuration of a ritual place and its position relative to other ritual and nonritual places.

ÜBERLEGUNGEN ZU EINEM KULTFEST DER ALTMESOPOTAMISCHEN GÖTTIN INANNA

AbstractThe present study aims at interpreting a Sumerian hymn pertaining to the cult of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, Inanna/Ištar. Though this literary composition belongs to the realm of royal religion, and centres on the relationship between the goddess and the royal personage, the hymn also provides an insight into a cultic feast of rather popular character. The text describes a ritual; its inner logic follows the course of a cultic ceremony. Accordingly, the term "implicit ritual" as opposed to "explicit ritual", or liturgical order, can be applied. Until now the Sumerian hymn in question has been treated mainly from a text critical point of view. Certain aspects of the ritual performance, viz. the playful change of gender roles, are expressed through the epithets of the goddess. Recently, attention has been given to those epithets that allude to the power of the goddess to change her sex, and it has been proposed that they show a shamanistic side of the goddess. In what follows we shall put forward an alternative interpretation of the change of gender roles by using the concept of play and game as intrinsic to a religious system. The cultic feast of the goddess Inanna/Ištar will thus be traced back to a ritual of inversion which serves to reconstitute the moral and social order as well as to consolidate religious belief. Since our hymn is considered to be one of the main sources for the reconstruction of the so-called "sacred marriage" we shall also touch upon this ancient rite.

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (review)

Ritual and Religion in Making of Humanity. ROY A. RAPPAPORT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; 535 pp. Reviewed by DOUG DALTON Longwood College His book was first accepted for publication in 1982, but Rappaport decided to delay publishing this volume to revise it to his own liking. He finally returned to it after being diagnosed with incurable carcinoma in 1996 and completed it in 1997. The product of over three decades of study, Roy Rappaport's book can be considered his magnum opus and is certainly a tour de force, well exemplifying his exceptional intellectual prowess and energy. Rappaport's work is nothing short of a fully elaborated theory of religion and humanity. It combines an evolutionary biological perspective with ecological, semiotic, and cybernetic communications theory and draws upon, in addition to very many classical and contemporary anthropological and sociological theorists, works of select philosophers and theologians such as Pierce, Vico, Austin, Russell and Whitehead, St. Augustine, James, Otto, and Buber. It is a lengthy, detailed, sustained close argument. Ethnographic examples are taken from his own fieldwork on Maring ritual as well as from other Melanesian and Pacific Island cultures, Australia, Native North America, Ancient Egypt, and JudeoChristian and Islamic traditions, among others. Rappaport's thesis is well outlined in his introductory chapter. Religion, he supposes, came into being with humanity and language, which requires humans to live in symbolic worlds of their own making and in so doing generates both lie and means to ameliorate its socially disruptive effects: religion. He clarifies that his argument is not functional but rather causal, or structural (p. 28). Religion establishes canonical True Word by combining it with irrefutably true, selfreferential-often indexical-performative messages about current state of its participants. Thus social and religious truth is forged in ritual. Chapter Two elaborates on ritual form, which Rappaport claims constitutes holy (total religious phenomenon) by combining sacred (discursive), numinous (non-discursive, affective), occult (efficacious) and divine (pertaining to spirit concepts). Beginning with definition of ritual as the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by (p. 24), Rappaport uses chapter to enumerate and explicate elements of this definition (facets of encoding, formality, invariance, performance). He concludes that ritual is a complex form in which self-referential indexical messages which verily demonstrate current state of their transmitters and invariant canonical truths depend upon one another. In third chapter Rappaport analyzes an extended Mating example of self-referential message transmission. He discovers that complex, continuous, analogical, social and ecological processes are ritually transformed into digital, yes/no signals of critical states, thus removing interpretive ambiguity and reducing private ambivalence and equivocalness of individual participants through digital statements of public acceptance. In following consideration of ritual's canonical content, Rappaport argues that ritual simultaneously creates and communicates states of performers and publicly indicates acceptance of existing liturgical order, yielding convention, obligation, social contract, and morality. Chapter Five deals with how use of objects and substances and unification of form and substance in paradigms of creation merge conventional cultural orders and natural laws. …

Osanna! New light on the Palm Sunday processional antiphon series

A model for the Roman liturgical order for processions on Sundays was Easter, the festal day described in Ordo Romanus I, rather than the preceding Sunday, perhaps a more obvious pattern for a procession within the Proprium de tempore.Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, 5 vols. (Louvain, 1931, 1948–61) II, 68–9, Ordo I, 5: ‘nam prima feria regio tertia, id est paschae, secunda feria’, etc. ; I, 7: ‘Diebus itaque sollemnibus, id est Pascha’. ‘Id est’ might be interpreted ‘for example’. Note that Easter is only one example of the papal processional procedures found only in this ordo. See John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome, 1987), 131–2. The present study originated as a paper for the session ‘Music for Festal Days’ at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 1999. The singing by the Hebrew people of Hosanna and Benedictus qui venit to acclaim the one progressing into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday would seem to be the ideal archetype for a procession with song to replicate a biblical event, reported uniformly in all four Gospels.Matt. 21:8–9; Mark 11:8–10, Luke 19:36–8 (with different wording); John 12:12–13. The Old Testament presaging of Benedictus is Psalm 117:26. The visual replay with the symbols of olive branches and palm fronds and the commemorative Palmesel, integral to the procession, have been studied in critical detail by Karl Young and many who have followed in the wake of his pathbreaking The Drama of the Medieval Church. Much of the music has been expertly studied by Terence Bailey. On musical and prayer formularies from the typikon and early Western patristic citations (i.e. Bede, Aldhelm, Amalarius and Drogo of Metz), see Hermann J. Gräf, Palmenweihe und Palmprozession in der lateinischen Liturgie (Kaldenkirchen, 1950), 10–15, 30–2. See also Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1962), I: 90–8, 519, 527, 533, 549; Terence Bailey, The Processions of Sarum and the Western Church (Toronto, 1971), 33–40 (Examples 6–14); 166–7 (Table 2). (The acclamation Benedictus qui venit–Hosanna in excelsis that follows the Sanctus of the Mass precluded movement by its position within the liturgy.) By the time of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the early 380s, the commemoration of the Evangelists' historiae had engendered a meeting at the very spot where in biblical times infants, strewing palms sang the celebrated Benedictus verse, now converted into a refrain.‘Et jam cum coeperit esse hora undecima [die dominica] legitur ille locus de evangelio, ubi infantes cum ramis vel palmis occurrerunt Domino, dicentes: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Et statim levat se episcopus et omnis populus; porro inde de summo monte Oliveti totum pedibus itur. Nam totus populus ante ipsum cum hymnis vel antiphonis, respondentes semper; Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’. [Peregrinatio ad loca sancta] Itinerarium 31, 1, ed. Pierre Maraval, Egérie: Journal de Voyage, Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris, 1982), 274; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels to the Holy Land (Jerusalem, 1981), 133. Other translations and descriptive material are found in Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 11. On the date of Egeria's report, see Peter Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 47/1 (1994), 2–3. Perhaps a half-century before, Chrysostom (Homilia habita in magnum hebdomadam 2) had allied the Hosanna exclamation with the exhortation ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ of Psalm 145. See James McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987), 83 (no. 175); cf. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN, 1991), 186. For the Palm Sunday agendas according to other Eastern practices (e.g., Armenian, Georgian and the Anastasis Typikon) see Baldovin, The Urban Character, 77, 80–1, 98.

A Sermon in Praise of Philosophy

Worcester Cathedral MS F.10 forms a random collection of Latin, English, and macaronic sermons which were gathered and copied by a fairly large number of scribes in the middle of the fifteenth century. These sermons, most of them anonymous, are for a variety of occasions and audiences and have been entered in no particular liturgical order, even if, as the presence of several sets of quire numbers indicates, the individual quires were reordered several times in the medieval period. The collection contains a number of pieces that were evidently preached to a university audience, as is shown by their addressing “magistri” and by internal references to a university milieu. Their locale was presumably Oxford. Besides such general university sermons, the collection also includes two that are labeled “Introitus Sententiarum” and three other pieces that agree with these in form — the scholastic sermon structure — and content — praise of theology or holy Scripture and Peter Lombard. These five pieces are introitus, academic speeches or sermons which, according to university statutes, bachelors as well as masters (or doctors) of theology were required to deliver as they began their courses on the Bible or on Peter Lombard's Sentences. In addition, the manuscript contains an item that is very similar to the introitus sermons in that it follows the scholastic sermon structure and praises its subject. The latter, however, is not theology but philosophy, and the thema on which the piece is based is not a biblical text but a quotation from Aristotle. A sermon on a secular text itself is a rarity in medieval sermon literature, certainly from England; and appearing as it does in a sermon collection, the piece seems to be a rarissima avis stuck in the wrong flock.

RITUAL, TIME, AND ENTERNITY

Abstract. It is argued here that the construction of time and eternity are among ritual's entailments. In dividing continuous duration into distinct periods ritual distinguishes two temporal conditions: (1) that prevailing in mundane periods and (2) that prevailing during the intervals between them. Differences in the frequency, length, and relationship among the rituals constituting different liturgical orders are considered, as are differences between mundane periods and ritual's intervals with respect to social relations, cognitive modes, meaningfulness, and typical interactive frequencies. Periods, it is observed, relate to intervals as everchanging to never‐changing, and close relationships of never changing to eternity, eternity to sanctity, and sanctity to truth are proposed. In the argument that ritual's “times out of time” really are outside mundane time, similarities to the operations of digital computers and Herbert Simon's discussion of interaction frequencies in the organization of matter are noted.

Index of chants in liturgical order

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Liturgical order and Glossolalia in I Corinthians 14. 26c–33a

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Shrewsbury School, Manuscript VI: A Medieval Part Book?

The manuscript Shrewsbury School VI (formerly Mus. iii. 42), an English liturgical book of the early 15th century, includes texts and music for processions, Passions and plays, some of which may have originated in the late 14th century. It has the format and liturgical order of a small service book such as a processional, but contains single mensural melodies rather than the plainsong melodies usually associated with the texts. Previous studies of the manuscript have concentrated on the plays; besides neglecting the rest of the manuscript as a source of further information about the plays, they have ignored the importance of this source as a collection of English liturgical ritual music. Because of the unique nature of the manuscript, many questions arise besides the usual problems of date and provenance, principally because some or all of the music may not have been monophonic as the extant material suggests, but polyphonic.