Introduction: the political dimension of liturgical acts

MOST of the Christian churches have been in a period of liturgical reform for several years: a period initiated some decades earlier by the 'liturgical movement' in the Catholic churches. Thomas Merton is probably right that this period of liturgical change 'is to be, and in fact already is, the greatest development in liturgy since the Patristic age and the most thorough reform in liturgy the Church has ever known' (1950; 1965:2). But great development though it may be, it is also a time of serious disturbance within the churches undergoing the strains of liturgical change.

Thomas Merton is only one of several writers who have traced the meaning of the term liturgy to the Greek polis, where leit-ourgos (liturgy) was the public act of citizenship that united the free and responsible individual with the Greek city-state. Merton notes, for instance, that in 'providing for' the ceremonies of the dithyrambic dance and its later civic developments, the Greek citizen simultaneously enacted the meaning of the community and its identity while affirming his own identity as a constituent member of the polis. To be a person, Merton notes, meant precisely to have a role in the public work of the community: a far different understanding from that which equates personhood with the private sphere of the self, family, and friendship. I will return to this contemporary reversal of ancient liturgical meaning in connection with specific innovations in the liturgy of the American Episcopal church. But the point here is simply that to take part in any liturgy is to signify to oneself and others that one is constituting a community and oneself as a member of that community. So to take part in the Christian liturgy is to take on one's role in a new kingdom: one that 'shall have no end'. It is the political act of all time and is therefore potentially seditious within the secular politics of a specific time and place. Caesar understood the political nature of the liturgy all too well.

It is meet and right, therefore, that liturgical change should arouse political suspicion and even passion. Certainly it behoves all Caesars to know what vows are being taken by their subjects and what freedoms are being claimed in the name of other kingdoms than their own. If, for instance, the final revision of the American Book of Common Prayer contains in its Catechism the instruction to the laity that they are indeed 'ministers' of the Church every bit as much as the ordained clergy, the Church's members may be entitled in principle to the same Constitutional protections as the clergy. Some laity may claim the right to keep silent about privileged communications, while others may demand the right to avoid military service: a right now granted only to the clergy and to those who successfully claim to be conscientious in their objection to military service. Liturgies give to ordinary people the right to make the world conform to their words: to be honored as indeed married, or to have their names and words remembered even at death. To be taken seriously, as free and responsible members of a commonwealth that has no historical boundaries, is the right of all who take part in the Christian liturgies.

The political aspects of liturgies have not been lost on those social scientists who have been preoccupied with the problem of 'mobilizing' individual energies for the tasks of building a nation. These scientists may therefore agree with Daniel Bell that liturgies 'drain' away the energies that belong more properly to political parties or civic institutions. On this view the genuine public sphere is outside the church, which becomes the sphere of private self-absorption and self-celebration. But to the believer, it is the liturgy that is truly public, and to participate in the liturgy is to free oneself from the narcissistic, self-preoccupation of everyday life, from political pride and all forms of social prejudice. The true self emerges as the believer states 'I believe' in unison with other souls who also proclaim their belief in a divine kingdom whose citizens they have been called to be.

The political nature of the liturgy arises in part, then, from the liturgy's claim to define the truly public sphere. That sphere is where individuals' true selves are manifest in symbolic actions that define and constitute their collective identity. The liturgy, by the sheer fact of existing alongside other forms of civic action, undermines the claim of secular politics either to manifest the individuals' true self or to define what is collective about the common life of a society. A Eucharist that unites believers in Calcutta and Chicago in a common language diminishes the impact of a pledge of allegiance performed with more or less compliance in public schools around the country. But perhaps more seditious is the claim of the liturgy to be truly public in the sense of displaying the true self of the individual. Liturgies lead one to a self that is otherwise masked in such profane performances as conversation, commercials, or Presidential press conferences. The managed spontaneity of these 'public' performances arouses suspicion that the true self remains hidden despite publicity. On the other hand, Merton (ibid. chapter 1) rightly argues that liturgies preserve the individual's innermost secret, known only to God, while at the same time the individual's true self is enacted in the public work of the leit-ourgos. At the same time, the liturgy suggests that there is something hidden even in the publicized activities of individuals whose selves do not come to light despite the glare of publicity.

Of course, any claim to define the public sphere is based on sometimes uncritical, but always ideological notions about the proper activities of free and responsible citizens. Sociologists are likely to criticize expressive or therapeutic activities as deceptive when these activities claim to enable individuals to realize their potential or to become their true selves (cf. Schur, 1976). To engage in consciousness-raising techniques in small groups, so goes the argument, is really to lower one's consciousness of the impact of distant and impersonal social forces, whereas to take part in rational efforts towards changing a country's laws or an institution's rules is to become conscious of one's fundamentally social nature, endowment and potential. I do not pretend to arbitrate the claims of liturgists and sociologists as to where the truly public sphere is to be found or where the truly responsible individual finds a voice, although I assume here that the liturgies of the Churches make an uncompromising claim to embrace, even to monopolize, the public action of the truly free human person. The words spoken at the liturgy are ultimate, binding, and true: the Incarnate Word, to be theologically exact. Those who mingle their voices in the chants and creeds, litanies and hosannas of the liturgy can lay claim to be taken seriously in any other context because they have been addressed and have spoken in the divine liturgy.

1.

The liturgy is the political act that calls all others into question. Certainly the radical nature of the Eucharistic liturgy is quite explicit, since that liturgy claims to inaugurate a kingdom that will eventually overthrow and transform the petty jurisdictions of 'this world'. But regardless of one's theological commitments, it is clear that liturgical language gives to the ordinary speaker a measure of control over those acts that constitute any human community and body politic: acts of witness to the individual's primary allegiance. Liturgies condense signs and symbols, so that statements about what is true become acts of allegiance to a human community that spans generations and crosses national boundaries. Other liturgical acts so concentrate signs into specific moments and places that the remainder of human activity becomes relatively empty of significance despite the claims of politicians or scientists that they can discern the signs of the times. Still other liturgical acts succeed in uniting what is spontaneous and inward in the individual to a collective creed and common hope, whereas few moments of political enthusiasm ever succeed in uniting the individual and the collectivity in such permanent and virtually indissoluble bonds. The liturgy also rehearses the givens of history while allowing space for new words of faith and hope to be spoken as individuals witness to their own visions within the context of the vision received once-and-for-all by the faithful community. Where else does the private vision find itself taken up without being lost in traditional forms of belief? Other constitutions are eroded by amendments and by-laws or altogether suspended when political expedience or individual indifference require it.

In making these statements I am neither taking theologians at their word or sacralizing language itself. It is not necessary to believe that through the liturgy a divine kingdom is actually encroaching on more mundane jurisdictions in order to affirm that believers undermine these secular jurisdictions by their liturgical acts. For instance, in praying for the Queen or for the President of the United States, the believer takes some ready-made meaning (Queen, President) and undermines or transforms them. The rulers become mere children: children of God who can err or stray like any other child and who therefore need support and guidance. But in praying for the Queen or the President believers also listen to themselves praying and thus discover what it was they intended without knowing that they were intending it: to establish, perhaps, a new human community in which all the children of God will be able to enjoy each other's presence and to confess their faults to one another without fear. The participants in the liturgy discover their intentions through the words and gestures of a service whose meaning was empty until they spoke its words, but as they spoke those words their own experience took on, as though for the first time, its true meaning (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1974:86-94). This may indeed be the process through which the Kingdom comes: leave that to the theologians for the moment to decide. But it is indeed the process by which secular meanings are undermined and transformed as free individuals discover their freedom through others' words that they utter of their own choosing. The 'one little word' that, according to Luther's hymn, will 'fell' secular authorities may simply be 'Amen' to another more everlasting kingdom.

In retrospect, however, Luther's faith in the nearly omnipotent force of religious speech seems like a residue of infantile narcissism in an otherwise adult speaker. To put it another way, the impact of liturgical language on the body politic is contingent on an array of social factors that when considered together, comprise the facts of secularization in modern societies. It is one thing to participate in the liturgy as though one were engaged in another act of verbal expression among similarly like-minded individuals in a society that mixes religious themes with its justifications for political authority: quite another to take part in a Eucharist that recalls a lost, organic society in the midst of a militant secular state. Certainly the possibilities of opposition between liturgical and political speech are higher in the latter than in the former: higher therefore in France than in the United States. Furthermore, as David Martin (1978b) reminds us, the Conservative or Liberal, even radical-Left direction of any liturgical speech will depend in large part on how peripheral and populist, as opposed to how central and elitist, have been the groups whose identities and styles have been expressed or discovered in their respective religious settings. High rates of participation in liturgies or the reduction of religion to a series of rites of passage will also affect the extent to which the hopes and fears, intentions and promises of everyday life are solemnized in liturgical forms or allowed to pass away with other secular artifacts like rumors, memoranda, and the daily newspaper. Finally, the interests and values of modern professions will determine whether individuals whose testimonies reflect their religious background are taken seriously or are required to transform their accounts of their experience into the more secular versions preferred by therapists, lawyers, and the critical intelligentsia.

Eventually secularization and its effects impinge on liturgical texts. The words of liturgies wear thin, lose their capacity to make one feel alive in the spirit, and seem strangely inadequate at times even to the great occasions of life and death. Certainly no liturgy is eternal or immune to corruption as a manual of self-congratulation by privileged groups. Perhaps Thomas Merton first became convinced of the need for liturgical renewal when he heard a preacher favorably compare divine love (I Corinthians 13) to the virtues of the English gentleman. American flags may accompany the cross in liturgical processions, despite the absence of appropriate rubrics for such displays of national pride. The self-conscious editing of archaisms and the improvement of the scholarship on which liturgical texts are based certainly can not prevent such imperial corruptions, just as new ecclesiastical editions can only remind the worshipper that even these solemn words are potentially mere objects for critical scrutiny rather than the mysterious vehicles by which individuals come to their true selves through collective silence and speech. Ultimately Caesar has been right in applying a single test to the value and authority of liturgies: the test of sacrifice. That is, after all, the hard fact of the Eucharistic liturgy, that it announces, remembers, and calls for sacrifice. If it is hard for some in the churches to remember that fact, it has been equally hard for Caesar to forget it.

2. Liturgies: the politics of 'representation'

The perception of signs is a political act in a radical sense of the term: making claims on the credibility and consent of others to the reality defined by the speaker. Whether the signs are 'social indicators' of a trend toward a two-class system or psychological indicators of underlying trends towards fascism or rebellions does not alter the basic point that symbols of underlying realities or of pervasive trends make implicit claims on the hearer's consent. The point is a mere truism among social scientists who recognize the essentially political character of scientific disputes and investigations. But there are important differences among these affirmations or attributions of reality, and it is these differences that are most illuminating in understanding the peculiar force and intention of religious language.

If we take liturgical language as our primary example, we will see most clearly the concentration of signs at particular times and places in the density of these signs within corporate, symbolic action. The liturgy of the Eucharist affords the most familiar and certainly the most dramatic example of such liturgical concentration and density. Words are indeed spoken, as they were spoken on the 'night in which He was betrayed'. Bread is broken, as He took bread on the same night and broke it. The tone of the celebrant's voice is itself a sign of the solemnity of these acts, and the cadences of the liturgy reenact the dramatic actions of the divine history. The liturgy is eventful, as the events are recreated and renewed in the actions of remembrance, breaking, consecration, and the administration of the sacrament itself. Music, silence, standing, kneeling, words, shouts of praise, acclamations, and mumbled devotions concentrate at these extraordinary moments in which every symbol becomes a sign of shared belief and common commitment, and every belief itself takes on a symbol in word or deed.

The most useful term by which to describe the force of liturgical language would be 'representation', had not the word been secularized almost beyond recognition of its original meaning. The sacrament is the means, of course, by which Jesus of Nazareth chose to represent himself: His Body and His Blood represented under the signs of bread and wine. But the sacrament represents the person of Jesus in a more active and literal sense. The early Church spoke of the liturgy as `showing forth' Jesus, until his coming again is completed on the last day. This 'showing forth' is a representation that makes Jesus 'present again' for the time being, during the time that must elapse until He is all in all. I would want to add that in this concentrated and dense form of language, the ordinary individual, gathered in liturgical action with others of common heart and mind, is capable of reconstituting all of reality in a form that transcends elite definitions of reality or imperial claims on the layman's consent and credulity.

By way of contrast, consider the meaning of the term 'representation' in secular courts. According to the ritual of the courtroom, the lay person is permitted to represent that a statement stands for an adequate description of that person's memory, intentions, standard practice, or viewpoint. But the meaning of representation is drastically reduced in that secular context. Instead of being able to 'present again' words and deeds that are of crucial significance in defining the person's present condition, the lay person in court is allowed simply to 'represent' that a certain statement conforms adequately to reality in the sense that others, given the same opportunity to observe or understand, would say the same thing. But the lay witnesses' representations are mere affirmations without authority and await confirmation through crossexamination, through the examination of other witnesses, and finally through judicial pronouncement on matters of fact before the court. As Foucault (1974) reminds us in his discussion of representation, language in the modern world has become an object of study rather than the sphere of the spontaneous expression of the knowing individual. How few individuals in court are allowed to represent themselves: let alone to speak freely of the truth as they know it.

The secularization of language turns liturgical events into mere symbols or at best into symbols that signify underlying more or less common and intense social commitments. Of course, the liturgy of the Prayer Book indeed deserves to be taken seriously in this more secular sense as 'representing' irreplaceable and unique aspects of a people and their history. Social scientists take the English liturgy seriously, because they also take seriously the human achievement of an historical community: of common memories and a common hope in and through suffering and failure. In a similar vein the American sociologist, Robert Bellah, insists that the symbols of the American civil religion are not to be despised because they have been illused by tedious and vicious politicians, since the same symbols stand for what is uniquely real about the human community within the American body politic. But even when religious language is thus credited with `standing for' the solidary and enduring ties of a nation and its people, language is being treated as merely representative of something outside and beyond itself and as serving a function of maintaining and pointing to that external reality. Religious language, however, properly concentrated in the dense structure of the liturgy, represents the reality itself within the words and phrases of liturgical action. Liturgy thus provides the substance of representation, whereas from the point of view of the observer religious language, liturgical or otherwise, at best serves to represent enduring social realities. The difference is between language that constitutes reality by being uttered and language that simply stands for reality. Secularization drives the opening wedge between language and reality.

Liturgical change and the political vulnerability of the churches

Certainly common hopes and fears and an openness to the mutual expression of the deepest human emotions are as important to the liturgy as they are to the family, community, or larger human gathering: and perhaps even more important to the liturgy than to these other institutions, since the liturgy identifies the supernatural unity of believers through the practical and tangible relationships of those who worship together (cf. Merton, 1950; 1965:237). Natural human emotions are the precondition and sign of liturgical action, as in the ancient Kiss of Peace that occupies in some revised liturgies a renewed place of importance as a symbolic act constitutive of the life of the churches. The refusal to exchange the `peace' would destroy the fabric of the religious community. In the same way, the refusal of the worshippers to respond to the priestly invocation, 'The Lord be with you', with the response 'And with your (thy) Spirit' would end the liturgy at that point. Revelation, in the liturgical sense, occurs between God and the human community only to the extent that it occurs between persons.

The orderly exchange of responses may gain its vitality from the spontaneous and mutual exchange of personal emotions and intentions, but the liturgical setting guarantees the ultimate reality of the relationships constituted in these symbolic exchanges. Liturgies thus challenge other human exchanges that lay claim to authority and credibility. The liturgy stands alongside, for instance, the orderly flow of Presidential pronouncements in the apparently spontaneous giveandtake of press conferences as a measure of ultimate reality and corporate authority. And the contrast can be politically unfortunate for Presidents whose grasp of the liturgical is at best precarious.

Once intrigued by the text of one of Nixon's press conferences, I eliminated the questions of the reporter. Uninterrupted by words from the reporters, Nixon's statements made more sense than when they were read as though they connected with something that someone else had said. His words had no necessary beginning and no necessary end. Least of all did they promise to lead anywhere except to more Presidential talk at a later press conference. His words offered little hope that his later statements would be more adequate, heartfelt, or memorable than were his current statements. The Nixon years were a famine of language: a period in which Americans came to realize that when the connection between language and reality is broken, people and institutions hunger for a nourishing word.

Contrast the flow of Nixon's words with a liturgy. Whereas Nixon's press conferences could begin and end anywhere, not so the Eucharistic liturgy. The liturgy begins with a greeting and ends with a dismissal. Liturgies begin with the blessing of God by man and end with the blessing of man by God. They begin with an invitation and end with a command to go in peace. The dialogue between speakers that was superfluous to Nixon's flow of words is essential to the liturgy. If a congregation refuses to respond, for instance, to the exhortation to 'Lift up your hearts' by saying 'We lift them up to the Lord', the liturgy ends. Liturgies require responses. Without the Amen the action of the liturgy cannot proceed: an early linguistic example of rule only with the consent of the governed. The Nixon administration, however, could proceed in its press conferences without appropriate response and displayed little regard for obtaining the consent of the governed. On more than one occasion he reminded the electorate that he would promise little, and his utterances were as unpromising as they were inconclusive. They fit Michel Foucault's description of language in modern societies:

For now we no longer have that primary, that absolutely initial word upon which the infinite moment of discourse was founded and by which it is limited; henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure, no end, and no promise. (1971:44)

Churches therefore tamper with liturgies at the peril of leaving unsatisfied the human hunger for an imperishable, utterly true and life-giving language. Granted the theologians' objection that the object of the liturgy is to be obedient and to sacralize life rather than language. Nonetheless, to revise a liturgy is to create, in effect, a new one and at the same time to remind the faithful that the connection between language and reality depends upon the scholarly and critical discretion of those with esoteric and historical knowledge: not upon a divine command and upon the faithful response of the believer alone. But words that enjoy only a contingent connection with reality tend to become secular in the sense of passing away. They join the world that is dying rather than create a world that will not end.

The radical implications of liturgical acts thus may be forfeited under the impact of successive liturgical 'revisions'. Of course, the linkages between reality and language always require the maintenance of commentary and criticism provided by scholarly elites, but a living liturgy dispenses with these specialists' services. Commentary on the liturgical texts is always permitted, and authoritative commentary from the pulpit or by the priest interpreting the sacred mysteries embedded in the liturgical text is often required. But these services are required the more the liturgical text no longer participates in and recalls what it also represents. Here I will assume that liturgical revision is a sign that liturgical acts have partially lost their radical attachments to reality itself. A liturgy undergoing revision, like a lobster growing a new shell, is vulnerable to its enemies and sells rather cheaply in the market.

Liturgical revisions turn liturgies into dispensable objects, but a liturgy, by its very nature, claims that its words will not pass away; they are not part of this present age, this passing aeon.

Although liturgical acts are not secular, liturgical change secularizes liturgies in the same way that criticism erodes the authority of all texts. Criticism, Foucault notes, asks how language functions: 'what representations it designates, what elements it cuts out and removes, how it analyzes and composes, what play of substitutions enable it to accomplish its role of representation' (1970:80). The lay worshipper thus becomes a lay critic of the liturgical text during periods of liturgical revision. 'Where today shall we put the Gloria, do you suppose?' Is the purpose of the Gloria best served during the first part of the service as an act of public praise or immediately prior to the consecration as a secret act of exultation among the faithful? Similar reflections govern the self-conscious analysis of whether to incorporate elements of the Penitential Order when it is not quite necessary, 'Is this a suitable day, all things considered, for a confession and absolution, or does the season and the special intention of this particular observance warrant their omission?' The lay person becomes aware of the function of liturgical language in being reminded that omissions and inclusions, changes and reversals in its sequence, and the play of circumstances and events may rearrange the parts of the liturgy just as they affect the ordering of a poem or a play. But to reorder the parts of the liturgy is to affect the whole in a far more radical sense than applies to secular texts where the meaning of the whole is itself problematical.

Once the wholeness of the liturgy is a matter for critical reflection rather than a taken-for-granted order, the reality expressed and established in the liturgy also comes into question. That reality, however, is nothing less than the divine polity into which one enters and in which one for a moment dwells during the liturgy. It is not a polity that one enters or inhabits unadvisedly or lightly.

To engage in liturgical acts establishes one as a citizen with other loyalties that take precedence over those required by the polities of 'this aeon'. But if the liturgy becomes an object for critical reflection, functional analysis, and the exercise of certain options, the constitution of the divine polity itself is then subject to amendment by the people. Under the impact of successive amendments, furthermore, even a republic can become a totalitarian regime or a series of parts unable to unite for purposes more enduring than the temporary allocation of rewards and opportunities.

Conclusion

Like other modes of speech, liturgies are not immune to historical forces. The secularization of liturgies may masquerade as liturgical renewal, just as most historical change is disguised by its proponents in the name of continuities with the past. But as soon as scholars, antiquarians, revisionists, or prophets among the clergy and laity sense a gap between what the words of the liturgy `really mean' and what the faithful mean by them, official pressures for reform or popular pressures for renewal through the vernacular join forces to revise the received text of the liturgy.

Some aspects of a revision may seek to permit genuine interiority and inwardness to flourish in (prescribed and permitted) moments of silence between passages of collective expression; the revised American Book of Common Prayer is full of such official interstices for private devotion. The revision may also seek to synthesize the givenness of prescribed passages with opportunities for spontaneity in the form of readings or unrehearsed devotions offered by the laity from their own resources; again the revised American Book of Common Prayer is a case in point. But it is then the text of the liturgy rather than the liturgy itself that seeks to overcome the fallen character of language by resolving the antinomies of givenness and spontaneity, or of collectiveness and interiority. The text, however, provides a space for the antinomies without resolving them. Indeed, no text can do for a people what they or God cannot do for themselves.

Once, however, a people have their own liturgy they become a people, and not death nor the state nor other peoples can do more to them than simply diminish their numbers. So long as the liturgy provides for 'the means of grace and hope of glory', that people will survive as a people whether they wander in a wilderness or gather in convents and monasteries to await better times. But a liturgy no one is willing to die for, least of all those who have authored it, will lack authority to unite the spontaneous and personal with the collective and the given aspects of social life. Regardless of how carefully the authors have interpolated moments of interior silence and spontaneous prayer with passages of collective language, the text is synthetic and will remain so until it is kindled in the hearts of people or in the flames of personal sacrifice.

The liturgy, however momentarily, resolves the dialectic between the interior meaning and sense of the individual speaker and the collective meanings inherited by a people who are chosen by God and who choose Him for themselves `by grace through faith'. All language, as I have suggested, is caught up in the dialectic between what is given and what is spontaneous: between the rite itself, the right order of doing things, and the original order to 'do this in remembrance of me' on the one hand, and on the other the free, spontaneous, fully intended and wholly understood act of prayer and praise from each individual in the speaking congregation.

Outside the liturgy, individuals can properly be confronted with challenges to their speech from those who, like therapists, find fault with inadequate signs of inwardness and awareness or from those who, like teachers and lawyers, carry the requirements of collective meanings into their encounters with students and clients. But within the context of the liturgy itself, these antinomies are resolved by each person in concert with the people of God who realize their true selves in responding liturgically to the divine word.

Liturgical language may never wholly satisfy man's hunger for words that are full of meaning and fully adequate to the occasion. Occasions carry their own particular meanings, and individuals always edit and interpret even the words of the liturgy. But the gap between words and meanings is narrower in the liturgy than elsewhere. I agree with Merleau-Ponty that language and meaning constitute each other and seek each other out. His formulation is especially helpful here if we apply it to liturgical or political language: 'What we mean is not before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification. It is the excess of what we live over what has already been said' (1974: 80). Applied to political rhetoric and to ideology, his insight suggests that in these cases the excess of life over speech is great. The meaning of political rhetoric can only be established by an historical record of deeds done or deeds to come. But in the case of liturgical language there is little more to be said than what has already been said and done. There is in the liturgy no excess of life over speech. Meaning has been constituted in words, and words have been fulfilled in deeds until, at the end, 'It is finished.' Liturgies alone can say that the word is done: Go in peace.

Efforts at liturgical change, however, are driven by a more objective view of language, as though language is separate from its meaning. Liturgists examine the succession of meanings acquired by words over time as they are spoken first in one context and then in another. Language becomes for them the object of thought rather than the 'happy' or 'spontaneous' animated body that is inseparable from the meaning the speaker conveys (Merleau-Ponty, 1974:80, 83). It therefore becomes a language comparable to any other: comparable even to ideologies and political rhetorics. The danger exists that liturgy will become similarly objectified in the minds of the worshippers: an object for study and manipulation like any other. In this event, the worshipper loses what is the last remaining possibility for speaking spontaneously yet in collective rhythms and for speaking from the heart in words that are understood by the entire community. As I noted at the outset, the patchwork solution of liturgical scholars, that pieces together moments of spontaneity or private reflection with the given order of the text, will not put together what has already been torn asunder.

REFERENCES
Foucault, Michel (1970): The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, Tavistock.
Martin, David (1978a): The Dilemmas of Contemporary Religion, Oxford, Blackwell.
(1978b): A General Theory of Secularization, Oxford, Blackwell.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1974): Phenomenology, Language and Sociology, ed. John O'Neill, London, Heinemann Educational.
Merton, Thomas (1962): New Seeds of Contemplation, London, Burns Oates.
Schur, Edwin (1976): The Awareness Trap: self-absorption instead of social change, New York, McGraw-Hill.