God and Mystery in Words Experience through Metaphor and Drama [Hardcover]

InGod 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. Poetry and drama, Brown suggests, grew out of religion, and therefore that creative potential needs to be rediscovered by religion.

Introduction
I. Experience through Metaphor
1. Logos and Mystery
2. Metaphor and Disclosure
3. Hymns and Psalms
4. Verbal and Visual Image
II. Experience through Drama
5. Drama and Religion
6. Enactment in Music
7. Performance, Costume, Staging
Conclusion

Over the course of these three volumes he has provided a fine example of how Christianity and imagination can be brought together in a creative and stimulating way. --Anglican Theological Review

David Brownis Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham University, and a Fellow of the British Academy.