In God and Mystery in Words

David Brown uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launch pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief.

Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Imagery and hymns mattered, liturgical music encouraged a sense of drama, sermons required rhetoric.

In a characteristically stimulating and inspiringly expansive study, that ranges from ancient Greek drama to modern poetry, from the meaning of the Logos to the history of vestments, David Brown pleads for a much wider focus on the kind of factors that aid experience of God.