Martin Mosebach

"An ambiguous love story, a summer night's dream set in the middle of Frankfurt."

Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil, das 1965 endete, hatte einen der revolutionären Kulturbrüche des 20. Jahrhunderts zur Folge. Papst Paul VI. ordnete das Ende der alten römischen Liturgie und die Schaffung einer neuen an. Doch der Optimismus, dass die Abschaffung des Lateinischen als Liturgiesprache der Kirche neue Kreise öffnen könne, ist längst vergangen. Martin Mosebachs provozierendes Buch stellt die Frage, ob die Kirche durch den Bruch mit ihrer großen Tradition sich nicht selbst ihrer Substanz beraubt hat, aber auch, ob über den alten Ritus bereits das letzte Wort gesprochen ist.

First published in 2003, The Heresy of Formlessness is already a modern classic, unique for its melding of poetic shimmer and keen observation. Martin Mosebach offers up a compelling defense of the traditional Roman Rite and a searing critique of the postconciliar liturgical reform through which ancient rites were profaned by tone-deaf modernizers. For Mosebach, the only coherent solution to this crisis is a wholehearted return to the old Latin liturgy in its tightly-woven symbolic texture of prayer and chant, gesture and ceremonial--the rich heritage of its "mystic benedictions" (Trent). Long out of print, this revised and expanded edition will be the more welcome for its six new chapters and foreword by eminent moral philosopher Robert Spaemann.

The painter Peter Schermuly created works of an artful reality whose meticulously detailed concreteness is the expression of pure painting. This catalogue raisonné makes accessible his entire oeuvre of oil paintings and sketches as well as wall designs. It presents an art that carved out space for itself contrary to all trends. Schermuly's mutable and original oeuvre led him out of an abstraction governed by visual rules and into the fascination of reality-inspired colour. The intensity of his gaze explored what the appearance of the world has to offer to a virtuoso colourist for a painting. He was interested not in recreation but in understanding the visible to develop colour phenomena suitable for painting. Profound knowledge of the history of the art of painting was for Schermuly a guarantee of his originality. The elaborately prepared and lavishly produced book presents an artist of rare distinction to the isms of the second half of the twentieth century.

Behind a gruesome ISIS beheading video lies the untold story of the men in orange and the faith community that formed these unlikely modern-day saints and heroes. In a carefully choreographed propaganda video released in February 2015, ISIS militants behead twenty-one orange-clad Christian men on a Libyan beach. In the West, daily reports of new atrocities may have displaced the memory of this particularly vile event. But not in the world from which the murdered came. All but one were young Coptic Christian migrant workers from Egypt. Acclaimed literary writer Martin Mosebach traveled to the Egyptian village of El-Aour to meet their families and better understand the faith and culture that shaped such conviction. He finds himself welcomed into simple concrete homes through which swallows dart. Portraits of Jesus and Mary hang on the walls along with roughhewn shrines to now-famous loved ones. Mosebach is amazed time and again as, surrounded by children and goats, the bereaved replay the cruel propaganda video on an iPad. There is never any talk of revenge, but only the pride of having a martyr in the family, a saint in heaven. “The 21” appear on icons crowned like kings, celebrated even as their community grieves. A skeptical Westerner, Mosebach finds himself a stranger in this world in which everything is the reflection or fulfillment of biblical events, and facing persecution with courage is part of daily life. In twenty-one symbolic chapters, each preceded by a picture, Mosebach offers a travelogue of his encounter with a foreign culture and a church that has preserved the faith and liturgy of early Christianity – the “Church of the Martyrs.” As a religious minority in Muslim Egypt, the Copts find themselves caught in a clash of civilizations. This book, then, is also an account of the spiritual life of an Arab country stretched between extremism and pluralism, between a rich biblical past and the shopping centers of New Cairo.