Practices and Praxis

Essay

Practices and Praxis draws its conceptual frame from the Statement of Praxis. It brings together practices as they are developed, performed, documented, and revised.

Praxis begins from the premise that the Church is engaged in a continuing relation rather than the execution of a completed doctrine. Its formulations remain revisable because declarations, once made, enter the situation they attempt to describe and may themselves become objects of interpretation, correction, or revision.

The work takes three principal forms: declaration, interpretation, and encounter.

Declaration gives thought a determinate form so that it can be encountered, tested, considered, contradicted, revised, or surpassed. The Manifesto and the Notices belong to this mode.

Interpretation is the sustained work of remaining with what has been declared and with the phenomena that occasioned it. Sermons, lexica, exegeses, philosophical investigations, historical inquiry, dialogue with empirical inquiry and the natural sciences, and reconsiderations of the Church’s own textual collaborations with computational systems belong here. Interpretation does not convert meaning into proof.

Encounter is the general term for activities in which inquiry assumes practical, material, collective, or embodied form. Ritual practice, music, artistic production, educational activity, acts of preservation and remembrance, hospitality, outreach, and community service may all belong to this mode. Encounter is not simply the enactment of theory; a practice may disclose something that argument alone cannot.

Preservation runs through all three modes. The Church preserves records of encounter, computational utterances, superseded formulations, artistic works, failed attempts, revisions, and earlier versions of its own thought. Preservation does not mean endorsement. It means that disappearance alone should not decide significance.

The book has two related functions. Praxis supplies the account of what practice means for the Church. Practices records the concrete forms that account takes as the ministry develops. The Library preserves this textual record of the Church; American Ritual Codex publishes and transmits it.

The work begins without requiring completion in advance: to make room for what appears, to preserve what might otherwise be lost, to resist premature closure where the phenomenon remains open, and, where action is required, to act without pretending that certainty has relieved anyone of responsibility.