Rites of Ordination

Paul Bradshaw, one of the world's foremost scholars on the history of Christian liturgy, has shared this expertise in several works that have become standard texts for students of liturgy. In Rites of Ordination, Bradshaw turns his attention to the ways that Christians through the ages have understood what it means to ordain someone as a minister and how that has been expressed in liturgical practice.

Bradshaw considers the typological background to ordained ministry some have drawn from the Old Testament and what ministry meant to the earliest Christian communities. He explores the ordination rites and theology of the early church, the Christian East, the medieval West, the churches of the Reformation, and the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church. Rites of Ordination promises to serve as an enriching resource for seminary students, students of liturgy and church history, and anyone fascinated by the history and theology of Christian liturgy and ministry.

Paul F. Bradshaw is emeritus professor of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, an honorary canon of the Diocese of Northern Indiana (Episcopal Church), and a priest-vicar of Westminster Abbey. He has written, cowritten, or edited more than twenty books on the subject of Christian worship, including Reconstructing Early Christian Worship; The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity; and The Eucharistic Liturgies (all from Liturgical Press). A former president of both the North American Academy of Liturgy and the international Societas Liturgica, he was also editor-in-chief of the journal Studia Liturgica from 1987 to 2005.