1st Edition

Liturgy Wars Ritual Theory and Protestant Reform in Nineteenth-Century Zurich

By Theodore M. Vial Copyright 2004
192 Pages
by Routledge

212 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

The nineteenth century was a period of intense religious conflict across Europe, as people confronted the major changes brought by modernity. In Zurich, one phase of this religious conflict was played out in a struggle over revisions to the ritual of baptism. In its analysis of the Zurich conflict, Liturgy Wars offers a strategy for understanding the links between theology, ritual, and... Read more
Introduction; Chapter 1 Religious Conflict in Zurich; Chapter 2 Contesting Humanity and Contesting History; Chapter 3 The Personality of God and Other Contradictions; Chapter 4 What Would Jesus Do?; Chapter 5 Meta Fights; Chapter 6 Liturgy Wars, Culture Wars;

Biography

Theodore M. Vial is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan College. He has published in Numen and the Harvard Theological Review. He co-edited Ethical Monotheism, Past and Present: Essays in Honor of Wendell S. Dietrich, and contributed the chapter on "Church and State in Schleiermacher's Thought" to The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Series Editors: Frank Reynolds and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

"Connecting historical theology with ritual theory, Theodore M. Vial's well-written and stimulating book analyzes this liturgy war, which ended, in 1868, with a stalemate: the adoption of two baptismal rites...Vial's book presses an important point of discussion between those scholars who emphasize practice and those who search for a cognitive theory of ritual." -- The Journal of Religion