Category: Obsculta Preaching Series
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Co-Responsibility for Proclaiming the Gospel: Part I
MEGAN EFFRON — Too often, lay people are described solely as evangelists who witness to Christ by living in the world. This is a worthy goal, but only part of our call. Lay people can—and should—also use their words to preach the gospel!
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Preaching as Real Encounter: Part III
LUCAS CHRISTENSEN — For these preachers, the liturgical celebration with its ritual of anamnesis has, in fact, made them participants in the vision of Christ’s divine light. Our ritual even today, with its art, movement, and hymnody brings us into the same real participation.
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Preaching as Aural Iconography: Part II
LUCAS CHRISTENSEN — Preachers in the East Roman world (so-called “Byzantines,” a term they never used of themselves) inherited a rhetorical practice rooted in the classical tradition. Among the engaging techniques developed in this tradition was ekphrasis.
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Preaching as Liturgical Art: Part I
LUCAS CHRISTENSEN — The point of the image is encounter. This sacred art is meant not merely to instruct the faithful (pace Gregory the Great), but it facilitates communion. This is true of all the liturgical arts—they are all forming an encompassing, diachronic and synchronic image of heavenly worship.
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O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
MICHAEL PATELLA — The O Antiphons give us a peek into the way the early Church, and by extension, Catholics especially before the twentieth century, learned and applied the Bible to their daily lives.
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Preaching and the Political, Part 3: Christ the King
BRUCE MORRILL – The liturgical year is reaching its culmination, as has the U.S. political cycle. Preaching on Christ the King in the wake of Election Day invites consideration of this feast’s modern origin and present implications.
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Retrospectives on Composing for the Church’s Worship, Part 5
MICHAEL JONCAS — Around 2020 I set myself a compositional project of setting all the Responsorial Psalms for the 3-year Sunday and Solemnity cycle of the Liturgical Year appearing in the English-language United States version of the Lectionary for Mass.
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Retrospectives on Composing for the Church’s Worship, Part 4
MICHAEL JONCAS — I awoke from a deep sleep sometime ca. 2 AM early that March with a single line of text and melody in my mind: “The way ahead is dark and difficult to see.”
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Preaching and the Political, Part 2
BRUCE MORRILL – Neighbor. The term bears an unsettled, even volatile quality in U.S. society this early November.