In her recently-published Rituals of Spontaneity (Baylor), Lori Branch investigates the shift from ritual to emotional expression in liturgy, poetry, romance, consumer behavior from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She asks, “How and why did the popular conception of poetry shift from ritual recitation and communal performance to the unstoppable pouring forth of the individual inspired heart? How was it that the history of Christian worship seemingly stopped on a time – that an evolving millennium-and-a-half liturgical tradition suddenly witnesses a principled defense of the effusions of free prayer that lives on in today’s televangelism and megachurches?” Good questions, and Branch’s book looks like it contains a lot of the answers.
One of the most charming things about the project is Branch’s insight that spontaneity itself has a history; free expression is a tradition .
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