Ritual studies and Deuteronomy

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-46
Author(s):  
Melissa D. Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Paula Pryce

Using evocative language, the book opens with a historical and contemporary exploration of the desire that motivates contemplative practitioners to seek an intimate relationship with the divine. It describes the effect of globalization and religious pluralism by noting a trend of Americans’ abandonment of mainline Christian institutions, their exploration of other contemplative traditions, and their subsequent return to Christianity when they discover its mystical history and current-day contemplative practices. The chapter describes core terms, concepts, research parameters, and basic sociological and historical information about the research community, a network of American monastic and non-monastic contemplative Christians who practice a meditation technique called Centering Prayer. Chapter 1 also introduces the terms apophatic and cataphatic to the ritual studies lexicon and offers a basic description of the novel ethnographic methodology that the author developed for research in silent communities.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolterstorff

This chapter considers why contemporary analytic philosophers of religion have neglected liturgy and focused almost all of their attention on religious belief. Following Descartes, reflections on mental activity and the mind have been central in modern philosophy. But that has not prevented the emergence of philosophy of art, philosophy of language, and political philosophy, none of which deal with mental activity or the mind. So why not philosophy of liturgy? Several explanations are considered; but none is found to be fully satisfactory. The Introduction concludes with an explanation of how the subsequent discussion relates to liturgical theology and to anthropological ritual studies.


Author(s):  
James Borders

This article takes a look at tenth- and eleventh-century rituals for the consecration of virgins. These rituals are described in detail in liturgical books with prayers, pontificals, chants, and rubrics for services that were presided over by a bishop or sometimes an abbot. The pontificals also contained accounts of monastic profession, church dedication, the consecration of a cemetery, the blessing of altars and other cult objects, and clerical ordination. The article notes that the services for the consecration of virgins were more erratic than comparable ones for clerical ordination. It also discusses ritual studies, which tries to explain the meaning of cultural phenomena through interpretation.


Author(s):  
Christopher Athanasious Faraone

This book focuses on the evidence for short, non-epic hexametrical genres as a way of gaining new insights into the variety of their often ritual performance and their early history. It also shows how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems, by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. In doing so the book combines literary and ritual studies to produce a rich and detailed picture of a number of genres performed in sanctuaries, such as hymns and laments for Adonis, or in other spaces likewise dedicated to traditional speech-acts, such as epithalamia, oracles, or incantations. It deals primarily with the recovery of a number of lost or underappreciated hexametrical genres, which are usually left out of modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period and beyond. Of central importance will be the surviving hexametrical poets, especially those of archaic and Hellenistic date, who embed or imitate traditional hexametrical genres of shorter duration either to give a recognizable internal structure to a shorter poem or to an episode or speech within a longer one.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 298-318
Author(s):  
Cas Wepener ◽  
Esias E. Meyer

Abstract This article offers the results of research in which two theological fields cooperated in order to investigate one specific repertoire of liturgical rituals. From the perspective of both Liturgical Studies, and its focus on the functioning of ritual within its cultural context, and Old Testament Studies, and a focus on how biblical critics understand certain rituals described in the Priestly texts in the Pentateuch, ritual burning and slaughtering in an AIC was studied. Ritual Studies is beginning to play a much more prominent role in the engagement with books such as Leviticus and Numbers and also in Liturgical Studies, and this article is an example of how these two disciplines can fruitfully cooperate in the study of liturgical rituals in an AIC in South Africa.


2003 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 221-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Stausberg

The topic presented in this paper lies at the crossroads between ritual studies and ritual theory. In order to get an idea of the field of study, it may be useful to distinguish between the following general approaches to the study of ritual. To begin with, ritual theory in the strict sense, i.e. with explanatory ambitions etc., tends to focus on RITUAL as such: what IT is, what IT does, how IT works ("functions"), and why IT is as it is.Softer varieties of ritual theory, e.g. approaches that wish to foster a better "understanding" of what goes on when rituals are being performed, may focus on RITUALS in a semi-empirical and semi-theoretical fashion. As a matter of fact, to a large extent ritual "theory" seems to be the result of theoretical reflections on matters of empirical research. Apart from that, we find studies of this and that phenomenon (e.g. time, space, violence, aesthetics, media, etc.) in relation to rituals ("ritual  and time", "ritual and space", etc.). Then, of course, we have a good dose of studies on different "types", "classes", or "groups" of rituals. Most popular, (in the absence of any statistical evidence), are studies of "sacrifice", "rites of passage", and "initiations", with "healing rituals" and "pilgrimages" as ever more successful runner-ups. Correspondingly, there is a number of studies about any variety of any class of rituals among the so-and-so people ("initiation among the NN"). Moreover, there are plenty of books about the rituals of this and that religion or people — in colonial times often published under such titles as "The customs and ceremonies of the NN". Last but not least, there is an overwhelming amount of studies devoted to the presentation or analysis of single rituals.


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