Common ritual knowledge

Abstract

How can participating in a liturgy allow us to know God? Recent pathbreaking work on the epistemology of liturgy has argued that liturgy allows individuals to gain ritual knowledge of God by coming to know how to engage God. However, since liturgy (as it is ordinarily practiced) is a group act, I argue that we need to give an account to explain how a group can know God by engaging with liturgy. If group know-how is reducible to instances of individual know-how, then the existing accounts are sufficient for explaining a group’s knowing how to engage God. However, I argue, there are good reasons to suppose that reductive accounts of group know-how fail. In this paper, I propose a non-reductive account of common ritual knowledge, according to which the group knows-how to engage God in liturgy.