God and Mystery in Words

In this wide-ranging book that moves from Greek drama to modern poetry, from the meaning of the Logos to the history of vestments, David Brown explores the ways in which poetry and drama in the past were rooted in religious questions. Their creative potential needs to be re-discovered, to bring present-day worship and experience of God alive.

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