Hey folks, this is a great Christmas item for the Church loving Catholic in your life and now for the first time it is on sale.
Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy by CMR’s very own Denis McNamara makes an awesome Christmas gift. If you don’t believe me, believe Scott Hahn who said…
“I believe that this book by Denis McNamara is the kind of mystagogy Pope Benedict called for. I believe it is the kind of mystagogy the ancient Fathers would wish for their own churches. Dr. McNamara knows that to contemplate sacred space is not merely to trace influences in an evolutionary diagram back to Vitruvius. To understand a church requires more than a genealogy of tourist postcards. It requires an interior life. It requires a hope of heaven. It requires a revelation. It calls for mystagogy. All of which are evident in the pages of this book.
Dr. McNamara has given us something we desperately need, something rare and great: at once an achievement of scholarship, a work of mystagogy, and an act of piety.” –Scott Hahn, Founder and Director, St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology
Or Cardinal Burke
“With his Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy, Dr. Denis McNamara has made a most significant contribution to the theology of the Sacred Liturgy, in the line of the luminous writings on the subject by Pope Benedict XVI, both before and after his election to the See of Peter. Dr. McNamara argues convincingly and well that the lex aedificandi, that is, the norm of building in what pertains to churches and chapels, like the lex orandi or norm of praying, by its very nature, gives expression to the lex credendi or norm of faith itself.
Among the many rich elements of Dr. McNamara’s profound and comprehensive study of Sacred Architecture is his most timely application of the “hermeneutic of continuity,” that is, the interpretation of Sacred Architecture in the light both of the roots of Christian worship in Jewish worship and of the organic development of Sacred Worship, down the Christian centuries. Dr. McNamara helps us to understand how a church or chapel is at one and the same time the House of God and the House of the Church.
I wholeheartedly commend the work of Dr. McNamara to all who want to deepen their understanding of sacred architecture, who desire to be schooled in the Church’s lex aedificandi. In a particular way, it is my hope that his study will become a standard reference for seminarians and priests, and for all who have responsibility for the building and maintenance of churches and chapels. For every attentive reader, Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy will not fail to offer a most significant contribution to the life of faith and worship.” –The Most Reverend Raymond L. Burke, Archbishop Emeritus of Saint Louis
I am not kidding when I tell you that this book is amazing and will be appreciated by the special Catholic in your life.
Buy “Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy” while supplies last.
November 15, 2011 at 4:38 pm
I literally live next door to a church that Mother Angelica would term an "airplane hangar," a rock building with no art, no crucifix (a risen Christ hangs above the altar), and the tabernacle is hidden from view behind a rock partition. Few people genuflect; most wear shorts and flip flops to church. People visit and talk throughout Mass, while a good number text on their cell phones. The atmosphere is one of noise and distraction.
Hence, I drive eleven miles to attend a traditional Catholic church. I believe the loss of conventional Catholic architecture is ONE reason many people have lost their sense of what it means to truly be Catholic!
November 21, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Someone should tell the Diocese of Orange before they close on this monstrosity. http://goo.gl/KVsAk