Feasts of memory : collective remembering, liturgical time travel and the actualisation of the past
Date
04/2021Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
How does religious liturgy connect participants to each other and to those that went before them thereby creating a living tradition that can span millennia? By drawing together insights from theology, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, we seek to explore the nature of communal remembering in religious rites. We begin by showing that the sense of memory used in Jewish and Christian Scriptures is much richer than mere fact recollection; to remember is to participate in the events of the past, to experience them as part of the narrative of a community’s present, and to fuel the community’s imagination about its future. Crucial to this corporate religious sense of memory is the concept of actualisation, in which some ritual or narrative allows the community to relive events of the past. We then argue that contemporary work on the psychology and philosophy of memory can help us to think about the application of these biblical senses of memory to contemporary practice.
Citation
Cockayne , J & Salter , G 2021 , ' Feasts of memory : collective remembering, liturgical time travel and the actualisation of the past ' , Modern Theology , vol. 37 , no. 2 , pp. 275-295 . https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12683
Publication
Modern Theology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0266-7177Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Description
Funding: Templeton Religion Trust (Grant Number(s): 58801).Collections
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