This 3-credit hour course responds to the questions: What is the Liturgy? How did it develop historically? What is its relation to space, time, music, art, and the body? The primary text is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, which will be supplemented by substantive magisterial documents, especially the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), the detailed historical context of which is provided in The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Dom Alcuin Reid. ENROLL HERE.

Required Texts: 
The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium)

The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Dom Alcuin Reid
Course Objectives: 
• To learn to read magisterial and theological texts carefully and critically.
• To be introduced to a major work of a prominent contemporary Catholic theologian.

Once you enroll in the course, you will be emailed a link along with a user name and password to get into the online classroom. Once in the classroom, you will have access to your theology course, the syllabus, video lectures and Fr. Fessio’s extensive coursework study questions. Each student is expected to prepare for each online class session by: (a) carefully reading the chapter or chapters to be covered, attempting to answer the Study Questions for that material; (b) attempting to determine the overall ­structure and intent of each chapter. The questions for the midterm and final will be taken exclusively from the Study Questions.