Bøger af Gordon W. Lathrop

These lectionary-based paragraph reflections carry enduring wisdom.

Gathering with others constitutes the essential symbol of Christianity. Assembly is the biblical name for this local community. The book calls the church to think anew about gathering and to refresh its practice, articulating a spirituality that engages the assembly's gathering into the triune God and turns it toward the needs of our neighbors.

The Protestant Reformation emphasized the centrality of scripture to Christian life; the twentieth-century liturgical movement emphasized the Bible's place at the heart of liturgy. But we have not yet explored the place of the Bible as the subject of critical exegesis in contemporary liturgy, argues Gordon W. Lathrop. He seeks to remedy that lack because it is critical historical scholarship that has shown us the grounding of the text in the life of the assembly and the role of intertextuality in its creation. "Saving" and revitalizing images of the past are at the heart of scripture and are the work of the gathered community. Lathrop finds patterns in biblical narratives that suggest revising our models of the "shape" of liturgy (Dix and Schmemann) and our understanding of baptism, preaching, Eucharist, and congregational prayer. He lifts up the visual imagery at the Dura Europos house church and elsewhere as a corrective to the supersessionist impulse in much Christian typology. He identifies the liturgical imperative as seriousness about the present rather than an effort to dwell in an imagined past. Saving Images is a call for a new, reconceived biblical-liturgical movement that takes seriously both biblical scholarship and the mystery at the heart of worship.

Renowned liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop has composed a rich, meditative, and explicitly ecumenical spirituality for working pastors whatever and wherever they are called: preachers, priests, elders, ministers, seminarians.In Part One Lathrop urges pastors to become lifelong students of the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, and the Commandments, continually inhabiting the questions, reversals and paradoxes of Christian life.In Part Two he elaborates on the pastor's chief activities presiding at the holy table, preaching, collecting for the poor "as the center and focus for pastoral identity and spirituality." Lathrop invites pastors to recenter their busy lives on God and fuel their ministry through prayer.