Divine Worship

Divine Worship seeks to contrast the worship styles of African American and Hispanics in America to the Caucasian churches that predominate in this country. Both of these cultures are presented as having a "holistic" approach to worship, involving the intellect, the emotions, and the soul all at the same time, whereas Caucasian churches focus predominantly on the intellect. The author hopes that by understanding the differences between the styles of worship, and realizing that all worship the same God, the styles can enrich each other rather than cause infighting, as is the present case.

There is in this text a tendency to look at the Catholic Church as being unbending and overly traditionalist. It is my feeling, as a Catholic reviewer, that some of the comments lack the academic respect that the author asserts he is showing. At the same time, there is no account taken for the differences in theology between the different "churches", many of which greatly influence their practices.

The first part of the book traces the early developments of Christian tradition, and asks which part of the celebration are the most important.

It seems fair to deduce that the ageless, universal, common, and core factors in worship are (1) and assembling or gather in g of people to experience the numinous (or divine presence) in encounter with their neighbors, (2) a celebration of festivals and sacraments, (3) the presentation of th

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r, then the culture each person is exposed to can be likened to the software one programs into a computer. Much of this programming happens in early childhood, before we can even remember it happened. Some of this is on the surface of a person, but much is very deeply ingrained and cannot be changed simply. Although there are always individual variances based on personality, we can use what we know about this "programming" to predict how people from a certain society will react in a given situation. At the core of any cultural programming is a given set of values. These are highly resistant to change and are passed on from one generation to the next. The practices of a culture reflect those values, but to infer those values simply by studying the practices is highly inefficient. Practices include rituals, heroes, and symbols. Rituals are highly important, and stay constant over time. Heroes evolve through a person's life cycle, and symbols are easily swapped for one another. IBM Corporation provided an exciting source of data on the values of different societies by allowing the questioning of employees with basically the same job in over 50 countries (Hofstede, page 22). The common problems faced by all cultures but
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Communication Individualist, IBM Corporation, Catholic Church, European Catholicism, Holy Spirit, Software Mind, African Americans, America Caucasian, Americans Hispanics, American Catholicism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, fiesta spirit, hispanic culture, everyday life, hofstede page, culture shock, gender roles, african americans, women supposed modest, quality life, supposed modest tender, religion everyday life, emotional gender roles, mainline american culture,
Approximate Word count = 2132
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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