Bishop Michael Rinehart

This lecture reminds me of the important way we taught liturgy at Philadelphia in the 1990s and 2000s. Each semester, the core liturgy class took a rubrics exam in the third week of classes. In other words, they learned first the historical and systematic rules, suggestions, and possibilities in the liturgies. Then, the rest of the course was dedicated to unpacking what the rubrics meant, or how they had theological import, or how they might contextualize the rubrics pastorally. And never, never, ever was a student allowed to defend a liturgical act or text solely by the words: “that’s how they did it first.”