
Honest Rituals, Honest Sacraments
Letting Go of Doctrines and Celebrating What's Real
Joseph Martos(Author)
Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published on 28. December 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
176 pages
978-1-5326-4045-2 (ISBN)
Description
Honest rituals are ceremonial actions that celebrate what is actually happening in people's lives. Religious rituals, however, often celebrate beliefs and doctrines (e.g., the birth of Christ, God's forgiveness of sins, or the gifts of the Holy Spirit) that have little to do with people's experience.
Martos argues that early Christian rituals were grounded in experiences such as conversion, community, commitment, and self-giving. Lacking a vocabulary to name such experiences, the authors of the New Testament and other early documents resorted to metaphors such as baptism into Christ, receiving the Holy Spirit, forgiveness by God, and the presence of Christ during worship. By the fourth century, however, those metaphors were taken to be unexperienced metaphysical realities rather than experienced realities. The medieval schoolmen developed philosophical explanations of what went on in church rituals, and the Catholic Church continues to teach that its sacraments are automatically effective despite growing evidence to the contrary.
What if religious rituals were to regain their original authenticity? What if the guiding value in designing church ceremonies was honesty rather than liturgical correctness? After liberating the reader from doctrinal constraints, Martos invites Catholics into a re-visioning of the traditional sacraments and a reawakening of ritual imagination in non-Western cultures.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Eugene
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
268 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5326-4045-2 (9781532640452)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
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E-Book
12/2017
Wipf and Stock Publishers
€19.49
Available for download
Person
Joseph Martos is a retired professor of philosophy and theology who has been a visiting professor or guest lecturer at more than two dozen universities and seminaries during his lengthy career. He is the author of Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (1981, 1991, 2001, 2014) and The Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study (2009).