Picking up the pace on our all-too-slow jog through my comprehensive examinations process, here’s a mixed-and-matched topic that crosses the areas of Liturgical Theology, Modern Liturgical History and Anglican Studies. (For those unfamiliar: “Ritualism” was the liturgical side of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism, both in the U.K. and in the U.S.A. — it’s the quite controversial “smells-and-bells” of High-Church Anglo-Catholic practice.)
TOPIC 5 (Liturgical Theology/Modern):
Theologies of Worship in the Ritualism Controversy
This topic, which addresses issues relative to the examinee’s proposed dissertation on the Rise of Ritualism in the American Episcopal Church, 1845-1904, will involve a critical engagement with key theological and polemical works arising out of the British and American Anglican Ritualism Controversies of the nineteenth century. The primary texts identified will be examined comparatively, in light of (a) more recent scholarship on Victorian Religion, to provide historical context; and (b) secondary, methodological studies in the genre of “liturgical theology” and/or “theology of worship,” to suggest frameworks from within which to identify and interpret the underlying theological presuppositions regarding Christian worship and liturgy operative in the primary texts.
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Primary Sources
Anonymous (“A Priest of the English Church”). Ritualism, its Legality and Expediency: Being an Examination of the Recent Work by the Right Reverend Bishop Hopkins and Various Other Authorities. Montreal: John Lovell, 1867.
Beeman, Thomas O. Ritualism: Doctrine, Not Dress. Cranbrook: George Waters and Son, 1868.
Debates of the House of Deputies in the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Held in Baltimore, MD., October, A.D. 1871. Hartford: Church Press/M. H. Mallory, 1871.
Debates of the House of Deputies in the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Held in New York City, October, A.D. 1874. Hartford: M. H. Mallory, 1874.
Hopkins, John Henry. The Law of Ritualism, Examined in its Relation to the Word of God, to the Primitive Church, to the Church of England, and to the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866.
Linklater, Robert, ed. True Limits of Ritual in the Church. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899.
Rankin, Charles Woodruff. Conversations on Ritualism. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867.
White, Verner M. Ritualism and New Testament Christianity. London: James Nisbet & Company, 1867.
Secondary Sources
Bass, Diane Hochstedt. Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Fagerberg, David W. Theologia Prima: What is Liturgical Theology?, second edn. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications/Hillenbrand, 2004.
Irwin, Kevin W. Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology. Collegeville: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 1994.
Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology. Collegeville: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 1992.
Mullin, Robert Bruce. Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Underhill, Evelyn. Worship. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock (reprint), 2002.
Previous posts in this series:
Of Studies, Liturgical, Part V
Of Studies, Liturgical, Part IV
Of Studies, Liturgical, Part III
Of Studies, Liturgical, Part II
Of Studies, Liturgical
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