BeliefNet tells “Why the Conservative Churches are Shrinking” – specifically, the Southern Baptism Convention. Cathy Grossman at USA Today says it’s because allegiance to denominations is weakening.
Archive for category Inculturation
What would you do if your priest spoke pirate?
The bewildering variety of the medieval liturgy need not scare us. It’s not necessarily a model for how things should be now.
Ruminating
Apr 16
Different ideas about liturgical inculturation sometimes take a lot of chewing before they can be digested together.
It’s harder than you might think to produce a vernacular (eg English) missal. What should be included? Well, everything that’s in the Latin missal, you say. And then the discussion begins.
Subtitle: The Reception and Implementation of the New Missal
Published by Burns & Oates (Continuum) – UK (ISBN 978-1-4411-0403-8, £10.99); Liturgical Press – USA (ISBN 978-0-8146-6021-8, $19.95)
Five brief chapters and a conclusion in the space of 118 pages may not sound like a big deal, but this book packs a punch far above its size and weight. The author, Professor of Liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and Professor of Liturgical History at the Pontifical Liturgical [MORE...]
Out of Egypt
Feb 19
Through no fault of his, this Egyptian Jesuit mystic’s letter to Pope Benedict was accidentally made public. The Church of today is too formal and too formalistic, he wrote.
Hopeful, anyone?
Feb 9
If we don’t identify new ways to organize ourselves, we’ll continue on the path to diminishment.
There arrived on my doormat last month the most recent edition of Church Building magazine (Gabriel Communications UK) featuring a multi-million pound community facility for worship, teaching and mission in the West Yorkshire textile town where I previously served as a parish priest. The building includes a state-of-the-art worship space seating 2,000, together with bookshop, coffee shop, crèche and function rooms, and office space for 20 pastoral and administrative staff. The building is spacious and [MORE...]
As a student of Fr. Chupungco’s and a graduate of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute at S. Anselmo, I must confess my bias toward the positions he takes. The core of his great contribution to Roman Rite liturgical life after the Second Vatican Council is the seriousness with which he treats articles 37-40 of Sacrosanctum Concilium (manifest in his Cultural Adaptation of the Liturgy) and his consistent recourse to these texts as he analyzes the liturgical [MORE...]