Summary of the Lent-Easter 2023 issue of Doxology.
Founded in 1984, Doxology: a journal of worship and the sacramental life is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of liturgical scholarship bridging academic and church communities. It is published by the Order of Saint Luke, a dispersed ecumenical religious order founded by Methodists. The Order currently includes United Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, members of Holiness movement churches, and many others. Doxology publishes work by established and emerging liturgical scholars to address historical, theological, and cultural questions about Christian worship and the sacramental life.
ARTICLES
The Offering in the 21st Century Liturgy: A Settled Ritual or a Ritual Seeking Change?
Allan J. Ferguson
The Covid-19 pandemic gave churches a chance to review the role of the offering in their worship. Not passing offering plates during the pandemic gave us license to reconsider the history and theology of rituals we observed surrounding the offering in worship.
Presiding in the midst of the Baptised: is there a liturgical ratio for presbyters / other celebrants in the contemporary eucharistic liturgy?
Thomas O’Loughlin
In virtually every human group activity there is an optimal number of participants; that number varies depending on the nature of the gathering, the extent of individual engagement, and the expectations of those involved that they see themselves as a ‘gathering,’ a ‘group,’ a ‘company,’ and ‘family,’ or ‘team’ — as distinct from simply being ‘followers,’ an ‘audience,’ or ‘spectators.’ This article addresses some important questions about how the size of our Sunday assemblies and the nature of local Christian communities more generally relate to research in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and communication theory.
A limit or a starting place? A response to Thomas O’Laughlin’s “Presiding in the midst of the baptized: Is there a liturgical ratio for presbyters?”
This response to O’Loughlin’s article “Presiding in the midst of the baptized” considers a question related to O’Loughlin’s own — not about the ratio of presbyters to congregants, but the question of the minimum size for a congregation to function as a congregation in first-world Western cultures in general, and in the United States in particular.
Throwback Theology Column: “The Gift of Union . . . The Body of Christ, the Host and the Church, is his risen and ascended Body”
Alan Wilson Watts
Introduction by Daniel T. Benedict, OSL
This excerpt is from the original, 1946 edition of Behold the Spirit: A Study of the Necessity of Mystical Religion. In this selection from the chapter “The Gift of Union,” Watts envisions the gift of union as incarnation extended into the church’s sacramental system, the life of the Body of Christ, and the realization of the mystical truth of that union in our outward and conscious lives.
POETRY
“Three Hymn Texts“
Lisa M. Clark
BOOK REVIEWS
American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture by James Calvin Davis
Historical Foundations of Worship: Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Perspectives. Melanie C. Ross & Mark A. Lamport, Eds.