Customer Reviews

Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: Weaving Together the Human and the Divine

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an insightful examination of the very human tendency to look at our lives through the stories we tell and the rituals we share. Using the two perspectives of story telling in the form of myth and parable Anderson and Foley explore how our stories motivate the rituals we perform both liturgically and in our day to day lives. In doing so we find how our humaness can weave with the divine. Understanding this is what can lead effective pastoral care. They review corporate rituals of baptism, marraige and funeral, but also discuss the need for ritual in the context of divorce, miscarraige and chronic illness. They also discuss reconciliation as an honest process of listening to the stories of others. This book is highly recommended for pastors and Christian lay persons.

Lutheran pastor Herbert Anderson and Roman Catholic priest Edward Foley thoughtfully examine the importance of connecting stories with ritual in worship and in pastoral care. They believe that our storytelling and ritual enactment can be both mighty and dangerous: "mighty" because human stories and ritual-making are "potential windows to the story of God"; "dangerous" because stories and rituals can also conceal reality and isolate us. This book explores how bringing storytelling and ritual enactment together can enrich baptisms, weddings, and funerals. It also explores the need for new rituals during such crises as miscarriage and divorce--as well as during such transitions as adoption and leaving home. Pastoral caregivers, worship leaders, and others will find the authors' points thought-provoking and their suggestions for joining story and ritual helpful.

My husband, a part-time youth minister introduced me (a priest) to this book. We both *loved* it. It says a lot of stuff that makes sense in ways we might not every have realized before. It will change the way I do both baptisms and marriage preparation--and I'm not even finished with it yet.

Anderson and Foley have really produced a master piece in the area of pastoral care. They have been able to bring to light the stories and the importance thereof in our postmodern culture.

Their dealing with events on which which our church tradition is silent is also most helpful.

It gives one the tools for exploring effective pastoral care.

Great book. Seriously great book. But the opening story of chapter three is "not available for the eBook edition." Chapter 3 is predicated upon this story, and I have no idea what the story includes. How in the world can one small piece of the book not be available?? Ridiculous.

Add an extra star for the print copy but keep it at three for the kindle edition.

i needed this book for a graduate religion course. i think the authors have their hearts in the right place but the terminology and sentence structures they use left me scratching my head more than a few times. not for the uninitiated.

Review of Auxiliary Book
In their book, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley present a case for the power of connecting story with ritual. Storytelling, an interpretation of life's events, and ritual, the narrative's embodied expression, serve to create meaning, build community, and reconnect the human experience to the divine story. According to Anderson and Foley, when storytelling and ritual allow for both the mythic (that which speaks of comfort and hope) and parabolic (that which speaks of challenge and paradox), and have a place both within worship and pastoral care, they "have the power to transform persons and communities of faith into signs of the presence of God" (pg ix).
Why should church leaders take time to facilitate storytelling and ritual in the contexts of communal worship and pastoral care? The authors provide several examples to support their thesis. The ritual of baptism locates "the beginning of each individual's life within a web of communal stories" (pg 57). Part of preparation for marriage is telling and ritualizing the family narrative, as the process of becoming married is indeed a wedding of stories. The "litany of lasts," a narrative remembering of last milestones in a persons life, helps family and friends walk through the grieving process that occurs after the ritual actions surrounding death (the wake, funeral, and committal) take place. In sum, Anderson and Foley offer church leadership practical ways to help people embrace the contradiction that is life, within both existing traditions and life's experiences where storytelling and ritual have typically not yet found expression. Storytelling allows people to communicate their interpretation of experience, and ritual, in the words of Lawrence A. Hoffman (The Art of Public Prayer), "arranges our life into relatively small packages of moments that matter."

Anderson and Foley are using of a wide range of scholarly research about meaning of storytelling and rituals in the book Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals. Vivid real storytelling of common persons in their life and newly analysis of pastoral ministry about various rituals which we cannot easily be aware in our life from birth to death! These are characteristics of this book. While reading this book, we find ourselves we give ourselves up to Anderson and Foley's analysis and nod the head their thoughts.

I recommend this book for pastors and Christian persons. Through this book, I hope the relationship between individual and community, pastoral care and worship, and human and divine is developed. Finally I will quote an interesting passage to those who have some problem for their marriage. "...by reminding parents that their children are not their children because they belong to God. When parents take seriously this understanding of baptism, children are free to leave with a blessing, find their place in the world, and marry, if they choose (p81)."

As a gospel storyteller I have highest regard for the power of the story. This book does a wonderful job of not only explaining the importance for stories in our daily lives, but how our stories connect us with each other and with God. Stories of our lives are not just for each of us individually, but they are also for us as part of the community and they are part of all of our relationships. This book shows the blend between stories and the rituals of our lives as well as how we can revitalize rituals with our stories or how we can create rituals that go with our stories. The way the book is written it draws you in with all of its stories. The authors themselves are wonderful storytellers it seems, and because of this they have been able to show the strength of story for one's life.

Anderson and Foley do a wonderful job of collecting stories and demonstrating how important these stories become in the lives of those who have shared and or experienced them. The beauty of this book is that they allow the reader to see themselves in the stories, these are not only the stories of the people mentioned in them, but they are the stories of all of us in one way or another, to one degree or another. Finally, they relate to the reader how the stories of us help to define ourselves. This is a wonderful book, a joy to read, and provides insight to how our stories become ritualized in our lives.