Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2010
Summary
Like many books, this one began in a classroom. The project began (though I did not know it then) in my classes in liturgical gesture now many years ago. Each week students would be required to demonstrate to the class their ideas about movement, proxemics, posture and gesture for some specified point in the liturgy. Because in Protestantism we have no ‘race-memory’ of these kinds of things – even less a General Instruction – the suggested offerings frequently seemed to me idiosyncratic and, more pertinently, obscure as to their intended signification. But on those occasions on which I ventured such an opinion, the dialogue almost inevitably drove itself into the corral: ‘Well, that's your opinion and I disagree.’ The problem seemed to be that, whereas in spoken (or written) language there is a relatively high degree of precision about the received meanings of linguistic units (‘You mean “perspicacious”, not “perspicuous”’), our other forms of human signification are much less ‘rule-governed’ – almost to the point, in some cases, of there seeming to be a lack of any clear syntax or semantics. The task at this earliest stage, then, was to give an account of meanings for those significations in worship other than the linguistic ones, which account might allow a higher degree of conversation about the nature of the signs and their signification.
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- Worship as MeaningA Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003