Liturgy Wars
Ritual Theory and Protestant Reform in Nineteenth-Century Zurich
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Book Description
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 socio-politics. Theodore M. Vial offers a new perspective on contemporary ritual studies - and critiques the cognivist approaches of Lawson and McCauley, as well as Catherine Bell's analysis of power and the body - by reintergrating the imporatance of speech acts into considerations of ritual.
Table of Contents
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;
Author(s)
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
Reviews
"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