Feasts of Memory: Collective Remembering, Liturgical Time Travel and the Actualisation of the Past
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Modern Theology
DOI: 10.1111/moth.12683
Authors: Joshua Cockayne, Gideon Salter
Institution: University of St Andrews
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,500
OpenAlex ID: W3130337039