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Travis W Proctor, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual. Edited by Risto Uro, Juliette J. Day, Richard E. DeMaris, and Rikard Roitto, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 343–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa021
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Extract
This volume represents an ambitious venture: a representative treatment of early Christian ritual, covering theoretical frames, comparative contexts, and a wide range of early Christian ritual practices. Part I, ‘Ritual Theory’, provides helpful attention to theoretical and methodological approaches to ritual. Many of the chapters here include valuable overviews of previous approaches to ritual, which appropriately situate the chapters’ distinctive frameworks.
The theoretical approaches in this volume, however, are not representative of the broader field of early Christian studies. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is given disproportionate space in the handbook’s theoretical orientation (five of the seven chapters in Part I draw primarily on CSR), while approaches gleaned from other fields (e.g. gender studies, racial and ethnic studies, disability studies) are given little or no treatment. This reflects the volume’s ultimate origins in the ‘Ritual and Emergence of Early Christian Religion’ project, a collective research venture led by one of the volume’s editors (Risto Uro), and which explicitly situates CSR at the centre of its inquiries (p. v).
