Living Beauty: The Art of Liturgy (Celebrating Faith: Explorations in Latino Spirituality and Theology) - Hardcover

Garcia-Rivera and Scirghi inspire hope that the Church can find a way to worship that is faithful to the tradition and 'living' in fresh, new ways. Living Beauty provides a path for discovering common ground among vying viewpoints on reforming the reformed liturgy today, and offers a theological framework for moving beyond the polarizing issues that have crippled efforts at liturgical renewal since the Second Vatican Council. -- Judith Kubicki, Fordham University In the interplay between theory (Garcia-Rivera) and pastoral context (Scirghi), this study contributes a perspective that may resonate with many different voices and allow some groups to move beyond the 'worship wars' into fruitful conversation. For those not immersed in such issues, the book is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary nature of aesthetic theology, this time applying the insights of aesthetics to the specificity of liturgy and further concretizing the theory in the lived experience of liturgical celebration. -- Lizette Larson-Miller, Church Divinity School of the Pacific Readers will find this book helpful and challenging, whatever their particular involvement in the liturgy may be. While it will be edifying to the individual, the book's theses are, like its very structure, essentially dialogic, dramatic and community-oriented; I suspect it would be particularly fruitful in group discussions. Although it is written from a Roman Catholic perspective, Living Beauty will speak to any tradition, with direct applications to Anglican and many Protestant liturgies. While some parts of the book may be somewhat dense for the non-specialist, overall the book is accessible to the educated general reader. * Cithara *

The Christian mystery, celebrated in the Roman Catholic liturgy, is a sensible mystery, and calls out for artistic expression. Living Beauty explores the Christian mystery and points to the need for a liturgical aesthetic as a means to encounter the divine mystery. A liturgical aesthetic gives an account of Christian worship in terms of a new set of categories that includes divine beauty, a theology of sensibility, and the new notion of a unitive revelatory experience.