This book uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launching pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Poetry and drama, the book suggests, grew out of religion, and therefore, the book proposes, creativ ... More

This book uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launching pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Poetry and drama, the book suggests, grew out of religion, and therefore, the book proposes, creative potential needs to be rediscovered by religion.