This is the Alcuin Club’s 2022 book – one of my resolutions for 2026 is to try and catch up on reading these – there are some older than this one on the “to be read” pile.
The thing this collection of essays draws attention to is the fact that most liturgical scholarship is people looking as words on a page, mostly studying past texts, sometimes contemporary prayer books, but rarely thinking about the primary experience of liturgy “heard”.
But as a collection of essays it suffers from repetition – they always do – each chapter provides the context as if unaware that you have just read others on the same theme.
Equally the basic argument of the collection is a simple one, what the people hear is not the same as what the Priest says, let alone what the Priest intends to say.
The study of liturgical text is often done as if the exist in a vacuum – forgetting that during Evensong at Southwark Cathedral the trains rumbling past the window are as loud as the choir.
As a footnote and an aside, there was mention that Justin Welby, while ABC, in the early 2010s felt that those under 35 found the CofE’s resistance to equal marriage not only “incomprehensible” but “wicked” – assuming those people have not had a homophobic epiphany in the meantime those 35yos are now 50
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