Posted by Holly Ordway in Music and Art | 0 Comments
The Sign of the Cross: Participatory Aesthetics
I’m pleased this week to be a guest contributor over at the excellent blog Transpositions, which is “a collaborative effort of students associated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews.”
This week there is a symposium on Aesthetics and Liturgy, to which I contributed a piece about making the sign of the cross:
From my post:
Perhaps the most clearly aesthetic aspects of the liturgy are those that involve architecture, art, and music. However, the participative, responsorial nature of liturgy means that the aesthetic dimensions of worship include the way in which the individual Christian participates in the movement of the service, a movement that is beautiful precisely because it is orderly, like a carefully choreographed dance. One very small, yet beautiful element of that participatory aesthetic is the action of making the sign of the cross…
You can read the rest of my piece here, at Transpositions – and please do read the other contributions to the symposium as well!
