Thesis advisor: Jane E. Regan / Employing a Christian practice approach to pastoral theology (one that is interdisciplinary in its scope), this dissertation argues that Augustine's mystagogical theology and catechesis provides the basis for a contemporary liturgical formation that transforms human experience into liturgical existence through the practice of worshipful wisdom. Chapter one considers the formative nature of liturgical worship. Both liturgical theologians and catechists view liturgical prayer as a privileged source for liturgical formation. That is, the liturgy mediates an experience and lived knowledge of the Christian message through its performance, one that forms the Christian in a way of life. The first chapter concludes by acknowledging recent scholarship in liturgical studies that has been critical of this approach to formation through liturgical prayer. Fruitful participation in this prayer, one that contributes to a way of life characterized by a life infused with liturgical meaning, requires the appropriation of specific theological and spiritual dispositions that are essential to any act of Christian worship. Yet, what are the theological and spiritual dispositions required for fruitful liturgical worship? Chapter two does not answer this question directly but rather offers a heuristic through the ritual models of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and Catherine Bell. This chapter suggests that for ritual prayer to function fruitfully, one must acquire specific dispositions, ways of knowing and practicing, necessary for any act of worship within a religion. In addition, ritual prayer presumes a specific telos, an end toward which the human person is directed and formed through ritual engagement. Finally, ritual prayer is formative when it leads to the acquisition of a certain habitus, a way of acting in which the ritual agent becomes capable of "ritualizing" in other areas of life. While these disciplines cannot provide a Christian specificity to liturgical worship, they can suggest the foundational questions that will guide liturgical theologians and catechists as they consider the theological and spiritual dispositions necessary for Christian liturgical prayer. Chapters three, four, and five, serve as an interruption to the more common approaches to liturgical theology and catechesis analyzed in the first chapter. In chapter three, I consider the mystagogical theology of Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, Christian worship is intrinsic to the process of salvation in Christ, a renewal of human perception in which the signs of the created world are to be used to enjoy the reality of God. This renewal of human perception takes place through entrance into the school of Christ--the Church's reading of the Scriptures and its sacramental celebrations. To participate fruitfully in liturgical worship, thus requires the capacity to use the signs of the Scriptures and the liturgical rites to enjoy God through deeper understanding of the texts and practice under examination. This is what I will call practicing worshipful wisdom. In chapter four, I contemplate what the Christian becomes through this fruitful worship, particularly in the Eucharistic celebration. Through the Eucharistic pedagogy of faith, the Christian becomes a sacrifice of love offered to God. In this transformation of human identity, the renewal of the Christian made in the image and likeness of God, the Christian's memory, understanding and will grow into a site for divine sacrifice. Thus, the interior life of divine contemplation is more perfectly expressed in one's visible actions. The Christian, within the life of the Church, becomes a living Eucharistic sign. Finally in chapter five, I conclude with an analysis of Augustine's mystagogical pedagogy. I argue that Augustine's sermons are rhetorical performances, using the signs of Scripture, to form the imaginations of Christians, their way of thinking about God, and to lead the congregation to become what they received in the preaching event. One learns about the liturgical act in the context of the Christian narrative, as a cultivation of memory; thinks about the practice through a theological seeking that is oriented toward both conversion and prayer, cultivating understanding; and then performs the practice anew through the results of these exercises, cultivating love. In chapter six, this Augustinian mystagogical approach is interrupted by the contemporary context of the Catholic parish. This interruption first includes a diagnosis of the primary malaise effecting religious practice in the United States--secularization. American secularization consists of an attenuation of the religious imagination, a discomfort with theological thinking, and an emphasis upon individual flourishing. Then, this chapter turns to contemporary educational theory, including John Dewey and Etienne Wenger, as a way of discerning how to perform this Augustinian mystagogical approach in a secular age through the catechetical ministry of the parish. I conclude that an Augustinian mystagogical approach in the present context requires a de-habituation from previous ways of thinking, as well as an intelligent socialization into a mystagogical imagination within communities of practice. Finally, in chapter seven, I set forth a plan of formation in which the whole catechetical life of a parish becomes an initiation into the practice of worshipful wisdom through the four fundamental tasks of catechesis and an Augustinian mystagogical approach to catechetical pedagogy. By means of this Augustinian mystagogical formation, the Christian learns to offer all of one's existence as a sacrifice to God, the Eucharistic vocation of the Christian. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1998. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-227).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1999. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-163).

Thesis advisor: Thomas H. Groome / The central proposal of this dissertation is that recovering the sacramentalprinciple and sacramentality—as a deep structure to all of life—is essential to Christian life, and thus to Catholic education for faith. The sacramental worldview takes seriously the material and historical reality of finite creaturely existence as the place of encounter with Holy Mystery. The seeds of an approach to cultivating this worldview lie in the ancient church practice of mystagogy. Chapter One surveys the epistemological and anthropological facets of the modern and postmodern contexts which posit a desacramentalized cosmos. Many find themselves confined to the limit and flatness of an instrumental, rationalistic, and data driven day to day existence within a commodity culture. This engenders a resistance to the depth of a sacramental cosmos undergirded by the love of the Creator. Furthermore, sacramental ritual and communal worship are no longer a primary place of formation or celebration for fewer and fewer people. Chapter Two traces the historical contours of the sacramental principle as a deep structure to Catholic Christian faith in particular, and indeed, to all of reality. This is placed in conversation with Charles Taylor’s philosophical diagnosis of the secular age and the sacramental theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet. It is into a “world already spoken” by the Logos that the symbolic order acts as a set of building blocks to construct our reality and is therefore the way in which we experience God’s self-communication in God’s transcendence. Chapter Three explores the anthropology and epistemological category of experience in the work of Karl Rahner. Rahner helps us to understand that experience is a necessary epistemological category—constitutive of human knowing. Second, experience is existentiell, meaning that all experience is active and lived, grounded in freedom. Chapter Four maintains that mystagogy was an essential interpretive frame of reference for discerning Christian mystery in the ancient church. The exploration of origins leads to a four-movement model—recollection, recognition, reorientation, and relation—that emerges as a constitutive pattern in early mystagogy. Chapter Five is constructive employing the work of John Dewey, Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Thomas Groome who emphasize the importance the epistemological category of experience in education. Moreover, the four-movement pattern mentioned above is discernible in the spectacular resurrection narrative of the Road to Emmaus and a model for education in faith, prefigured by Jesus’ earthly pedagogy. Consequently, I propose a more extended, broader sense of a mystagogical approach for contemporary praxis to enable the reclamation of an essential sacramental imagination for our time. The telos of these four movements of mystagogy is to enable an anagnorisis—a re-cognition and response to the presence of Holy Mystery within everyday experience. Finally, Chapter Six engages the implications of the foregoing. Mystagogy is an indexical praxis which invites us to be life-long apprentices to becoming alert to God’s hidden presence in our lived experience. It is the rehearsal of a disposition that understands reality as saturated by grace, and learning to accept it as both gift and obligation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

As a still relatively young art form, cinema has evolved tremendously over the last one hundred and twenty-five years. However, as perhaps the most accessible popular art form at our disposal, it does not function merely as entertainment. This essay argues that film aesthetics are more than meets the eye. Through analysis of three northern European directors (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Lars von Trier), I argue that cinema is an inherently mystical medium. Through this designation, I work to show how cinema functions to bring one to closer union with God, and thus function as sacramental. Both individual experience and communal consensus make viewing cinema an intensely pragmatic, and important, practice. Through the affective nature of cinema, the individual becomes malleable toward the cultivation of virtue. The mystical encounters one experiences become a co-participatory, pedagogical relationship between viewer and medium.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-171).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2004. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [207]-211).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2004. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [207]-211).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2004. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [207]-211).

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-08-25T11:54:58Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Thiago Aparecido Faccini Paro.pdf: 1657489 bytes, checksum: c62424fe31ba2329d429912e10ebdb37 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-25T11:54:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Thiago Aparecido Faccini Paro.pdf: 1657489 bytes, checksum: c62424fe31ba2329d429912e10ebdb37 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The ain of this study, reflection of methods and practices in the initiation process the Christian life of our communities, showing that not only an oral transmission of the faith. Its to have faith is experienced by the senses and celebrated conscious, and it is through experience and understanding of the ritual. We conduct a historical Christian Initiation in the early church, identifying the anthropological, cultural and theological foundations for a “Initiation” containing rituals and symbols. Since the Second Vatican Council had decreed the restoration of the catechumenate of adults lived in stages. The Rite of Christian Initiation (RICA), which rises from there, it becomes a valuable instrument of inspiration that must be recognized and valued by the communities. Rescued understanding of the initiation process of the early Church and the deeper understanding of the structure and dynamics celebratory ritual RICA, uniting catechesis and liturgy, comes a proposed application of the RICA child catechesis. The proposal is provocative and to achieve your goals you must uninstall routine and methodology as used today by many catechists who have not kept yearning manifested the Church as a whole experiences and documents. Are small actions, in the long run, will form a new assembly celebrant: active participants in and aware of what this celebrating / O presente trabalho teve, como objetivo, refletir sobre os métodos e práticas adotadas no processo de iniciação à vida cristã de nossas comunidades, mostrando que não basta apenas uma transmissão oral da fé. É preciso fazer com que a fé seja experimentada pelos sentidos e celebrada de maneira consciente, e isso se dá através da vivência e compreensão de toda ação ritual. Neste sentido, buscou-se fazer um resgate histórico da Iniciação Cristã da Igreja primitiva, identificando os fundamentos antropológicos, culturais e teológicos para uma “Iniciação” permeada por ritos e símbolos. Já o Concílio Ecumênico Vaticano II havia decretado a restauração do catecumenato dos adultos vividos em etapas. O Ritual de Iniciação Cristã (RICA), que nasce a partir daí, torna-se um valioso instrumento de inspiração que deve ser reconhecido e valorizado pelas comunidades. Resgatando o entendimento do processo iniciático da Igreja primitiva e a e compreensão mais profunda da estrutura e dinâmica ritual celebrativa do RICA, unindo catequese e liturgia, surge uma proposta de aplicação do RICA a catequese infantil. A proposta é provocativa e para atingir seus objetivos deverá desinstalar a metodologia rotineira e tão utilizada ainda hoje por muitos catequistas que não têm acompanhado o anseio da Igreja manifestado em seu conjunto de experiências e documentos. São pequenas ações, que em longo prazo, poderão formar uma nova assembleia celebrante: ativa, participante e consciente do que esta celebrando