I am pondering a couple of book reviews. First is Albert Rouet's Liturgy and The Arts. I've posted about it recently in an attempt to slog through much of his Catholicism. Overall, it's a good book. I enjoyed it. But he burried the lead. It is not until the end of the book that he clarifies his specific anthropological perspective. "For [the church's] unity is a journey, movement, and life. It is a communion and by way of the progression of this communion, a departure and a mission. The liturgy takes the world in its hands to offer it to God. It consecrates the world. People who are baptized, consecrated by the Spirit, are a people whose whole life becomes a work of praise." I truly wish he had started with this. Alas...Now I feel I need to go back and reread the damn thing. Ha!
The second book I need to review for you all is Shop Class as Soul Craft. I'm done with it. I loved it. Where Rouet writes of what "liturgy" and "the arts" do as if they were independent actors on their own, Matthew B. Crawford writes of people and how they problem solve, think, understand, etc. He writes of people. I dig it. He's attempting to get us unstuck from the morass of believing that "shop class" is a metaphor for "unthinking people."
The idea I'm mulling over is rather simple: I want to write the book about how liturgy is a craft, a way of thinking. I want to marry Rouet and Crawford's approaches in some way. Liturgy is something we do. It is a means of as well as a form of thinking, of theological problem solving, of the invention of people in community.
More to come.
Tony Jones says denominations may be going away. Who can say? Is it as unlikely as Esperanto? Perhaps.
