Gail Ramshaw

Gail Ramshaw is a premier historian and theologian of Christian liturgy, and her contributions to understanding and shaping American Christian worship in the last 25 years are formidable. Here she offers a novel and creative way to bridge the great cultural divide between today's student and the chief Christian rites rooted in the ancient world. Eschewing the usual theoretical explanations of liturgy as well as simple narratives of the development of Christian worship, Ramshaw instead focuses on the experience of liturgy. She shows how the roots of Christian liturgy--ritual, symbol, sacred language and chant--have developed over the centuries in very distinctive ways and left us with a rich but also embattled heritage.This unique textbook not only lays out the religious-studies framework of a contemporary understanding of worship, it also offers a full history of Christian worship in each historical period, including the American experience. In light of this history of experiences, Ramshaw finally addresses ongoing issues (gender, authority, ethics, skepticism) and places them into an explicitly cross-religious framework with Islam, Judaism, and other traditions.