Worship as Catechesis

This essay seeks to develop an understanding of Christian catechesis as a practice, or set of practices, informed, at heart, by doxology. The acquisition of “knowledge” that variously constitutes the catechetical or educative enterprise within Christian communities is bound up entirely with the praise and adoration of God within the eucharistic fellowship of the body of Christ gathered together in worship. To know, in this way, is to be changed, remade, transformed. To know rightly, as Augustine would teach us, is to desire God—just as to desire God is to know rightly. On this view, catechesis occurs, first and foremost, not as exposition apart from the liturgical community, but performatively within it.