Worship Weblog
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Philosophy and Liturgy Conference - Update 1
Update from the Philosophy and Liturgy conference:
“This conference is the beginning of the fulfillment of a dream that I’ve had for about 25 years--getting philosophers to engage liturgy,” said Nicholas Wolterstorff to begin the conference. Too often philosophers content themselves with talking only about belief and epistemologies of belief, he said, while liturgy is considered mere ritual. Wolterstorff laid out a definition of liturgy as “scripted action” in a broad sense. In liturgy we “face God” and “affirm the worth” of God. Liturgy is not just a ritual that expresses social values, traditions, and beliefs; it is a response to core underlying reason or logic (he used the Latin word ‘ratio,’ akin to the Greek ‘logos’) to worship, and this demands further philosophical attention. Questions Wolterstorff suggested for philosophical discussion included:
- what does it mean to pray a psalm as one’s own words?
- what is going on in the liturgical use of the present tense ("Christ is born today")?
- in entering a worship space, do we leave secular space?
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