[Magdalen] currently reading

[Scott Knitter]

I'd like to be reading so many things. Some day. Right now I'm in fact
reading contract documents for a large HP deal. Next deadline is
tomorrow. Monday deadlines mean working weekends. I had to bolt out
the door of church after subdeaconing our really wonderful Corpus
Christi Mass and Benediction, staying only to sing happy birthday to
our 70-year-old head MC.

Hope soon to finish Martin Thornton's Prayer: A New Encounter, which
is dense and wonderful except his gripes about the Daily Office being
in need of a restructuring to take out the Biblical readings and put
them in a separate Office of Readings. I investigated this, and such
an Office of Readings would, in his opinion, be done twice a day, and
in my opinion amount to...drum roll, please...Daily Morning and
Evening Prayer. He advocated another office of praise that would be
psalms and canticles and would be memorized and done from one to seven
times a day.

I think the Office as we have it now is fine; it doesn't bother me
that the readings are there; juxtaposing readings with psalms,
canticles, and prayers cross-fertilizes the various genres and
enriches the liturgy. So he loses me on the Office bits, but his
outworking of the concepts of prayer, Trinity, Being, and so on is
fascinating. Heavily based (he admits) on John Macquarrie's magnum
opus of theology tinged with philosophy.

-- 
Scott R. Knitter
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA