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Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

Book by Lori Branch · 2 quotes · Feeling, Prayer, Abstract

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Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth Quotes

“Bunyan points out, for example, how the Pharisees of Jesus’ day no doubt phrased their prayers well but were condemned because they fell short of “pouring out” their hearts to God (IWP, 38). Without help from the Holy Spirit in purifying and pouring out the heart, he writes, one who prays is “hyp- ocritical, cold, and unseemly” and “abominable to God” (IWP, 37). The hypocrisy God detests, then, is importantly not a matter of say- ing one thing and doing another, but of saying one thing and feeling another: of a disjunction between the logocentric intellect and the heart, between the propositional truths of abstract doctrine and the emotions which are substantively to mirror and confirm it.”

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“When the matter at hand is eternal salvation or damnation, the “unsettled soul” suspicious of ritual and tradition looks for evidence of her spiritual condition as close to the knowing self as possible, not in the objective mathematical language to which the Royal Society aspired but in objective experiences of spontaneous, passionate speech: in the substance of the inmost, most immediate thoughts and feelings, evinced by spontaneous, fervent prayer, which it takes both scientifically and economically as proofs and tokens of grace. If the Restoration witnessed the rise of what Robert Markley has called the ideology of objectivity, it also saw the coalescence of a related ideology of spontaneity. Concerned with the science of the soul and informed by emerging market and commercial logic, the cardinal points of this ideology were authentic and immediate sincerity (as opposed to performance or artifice), pure desire (as opposed to coldness, hypocrisy or a bifurcation between doctrinal knowledge and feeling), freedom (as opposed to form), and novelty and currency (as opposed to the repetitive, the boring, and the out-of-date). In the consolidation of the discourse and practice of free prayer, we see the culmination of Renaissance crises of representation and the fruition of the dramatic Reformation attacks on ritual, when under increasing pressures toward certainty and ever more entrenched economic logics, spontaneity becomes policy: not an option, but, for growing numbers of Protestants, paradoxically an obligation and the sine qua non of valid prayer and a saved subjectivity.”

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Book:Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth
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