This volume inaugurates a series celebrating the liturgical and ecumenical breakthrough that has marked the past several decades. Both Jews and Christians have come to new, even revolutionary, views of worship, not only how it began but also what it is today. The first volume describes how the liturgies of synagogue and church were born and how they evolved through the ages. This dual focus on both past and present, by no means accidental, shows clearly that from a liturgical point of view there is no such thing as purely academic scholarship. In an age that values tradition even as it criticizes it, the reconstruction of yesterday's liturgical practice has an impact upon today's spirituality.
The idea for Bradshaw's and Hoffman's three-volume series came from what may have been the first-joint Jewish and Christian conference on liturgy, held at the University of Notre Dame in June, 1988. The first two volumes of this series contain some of the papers delivered at the conference itself, and other contributions that were specially written to complement them.
Contributors: Paul F. Bradshaw, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Tzvee Zahavy, Marilyn J. S. Chiat and Marchita B. Mauck, Stefan C. Reif, Eric L. Friedland, John F. Baldovin, S.J., and Susan J. White.