New Book Notice: Liturgical Drama

Forthcoming in Summer of 2009, Paulist Press will publish:

Christine C. Schnusenberg, The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama: The Eucharist as Theater (Paulist, 2009), ISBN 0809105446.

Its interesting thesis is described in the blurb:

This book, of unprecedented scope and richness, explores the multiple dimensions of the theater, open to detail and hermeneutic possibilities. It synthesizes an immense amount of cultural complexities. It arose out of the question about the problem of the polemics of the Church Fathers against the Roman theater and the subsequent manifestations of Western liturgical drama as a continuation of the Roman theater until Amalarius of Metz. She holds that theater was worship and worship was theater beckoning for participation in the mimetic repetition of the drama of a given cosmogonic myth. Having laid out a vast panorama, the book concludes with the argument that the beginning of the Christian theater, as embedded in the cosmogony of the Christ event, developed out of the same mimetic cosmogonic stream as those from times immemorial.

It is available on Amazon for pre-order.