Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Hip hoppin to the Lord?

Mark Shea reported the Episcopalians have thrown one more tidbit into the let's-warp-traditional-liturgy-real-good pot: hip hop masses!

Philosophically speaking, I am curious how a rejection of such hip hop masses would not also entail a rejection of masses in the vernacular. Vernacular is the "lived language" of a people group; and in some cases, unless we simply reject their claims about it, hip hop is the lived language of some groups of people. I can't imagine pinpointing a "standard vernacular English" for all of the English speaking world. (After all, I assure you as an ESL teacher in Taiwan, the most common English in the world, the true vernacular, is English poorly spoken!) And so, as long hip hop falls in the limits of mutual intelligibility with a native English speaker, it's just a dialect of the vernacular.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not actually endorsing such liturgy. I have my own thoughts about its illicit nature (e.g., various bodily and vocal behavior associated with "speaking" hip hop, the greater influence of the whole to the part for setting litrugical rubrics, etc.). But, again, on reasoned grounds, what makes a vernacular Mass more valid than a hip hop mass?

All in all, such shenanigans do make me look fondly to the FSSP. Oddly enough, next Sunday is a major prayer day for vocations.....!

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