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Catherine Madsen,
In Medias Res: Liturgy for the
Estranged
About the Book
For readers skeptical about religion but drawn to ritual,
In Medias Res offers a liturgical cycle for the seasons
and for life passages, sketching a religion of nature in
which nature is vulnerable to history. Unlike many books of
ritual for skeptics, the focus is not on rational statements
of belief but on artistic coherence – language and action
that will continue to yield meaning over time. An unusual
synthesis of original and quoted material, religious and
literary sources, intellectual breadth and emotional
intimacy, In Medias Res presents both a performable
body of ritual and a valuable method for liturgical writing.
Contents
Introduction: Prometheus Stealing Torah for the People:
Notes Toward New Liturgy
Notes on the Form and Performance of the Rituals
part
i—Seasonal Rituals
Invocations; Winter Solstice; The Trees’ Praise; The Feast
of Fools; Mayday; Midsummer; Harvest; Fall Equinox;
Allhallows
part ii—Prayers
Prayers for Various Occasions; Prayers for Women
part iii—Rites
of Passage
Naming a Baby; Coming of Age; Questions for Couples
Contemplating Marriage; Marriage; Divorce; Healing; Burial
“In medias res: to stand right here, for once, in the
middle of the temple of things, with all our vertigo and
tenderness, our unlikely desires, our eccentric hopes.
Trying to remember the liturgies we need to invent, to
improvise the rituals we must already have learned. For us,
standing here, Catherine Madsen offers a book of unyielding
beauties—and surprising comforts.” – Mark D. Jordan, Emory
University
“Madsen’s writing is brilliantly epigrammatic, lapidary
without fussiness, emotionally charged without
sentimentality, lyrical without being singsong. This liturgy
neither pretends to know more of existence than we can, nor
less of existence than we do: clear-eyed, unapologetic, lit
by the loneliness without which there is no hope of
connection, this is liturgy for grownups.” – Joy Ladin
"A
brilliantly orchestrated bricolage of quotations from
a wide array of both secular and religious writers. A
profoundly learned liturgy in the range of its ideas and the
breadth of its acknowledgment of tradition, forged into a
seamless, compelling whole. Madsen's work exists at the
intersection of the imagination and the moral life." —
Mark Doty
“In a
time when we are no longer sure that the earth will abide
forever, we urgently need language and rituals by which we
can express our concerns and sustain our hopes. Catherine
Madsen’s intelligent new work offers a deep spiritual and
moral aesthetic that can move all of us to act—for our own
sake and for the world’s.”
– Ellen Bernstein, Founder of Shomrei Adamah; author of
The Splendor of Creation
About the Author
Catherine Madsen is the author of The Bones Reassemble,
an incisive and groundbreaking interdisciplinary
critique of modern liturgical language. She is a former
contributing editor to the interreligious journal
CrossCurrents and the author of many essays and a novel,
A Portable Egypt.
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