The liturgy of the Christian church is often dismissed today as archaic, arcane—or dead. But as Cosima Clara Gillhammer shows in her new book Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy, these ritual forms were once the very heartbeat of Western culture and continue to shape not only our cultural memory but even contemporary cultural practice.

In this episode, we explore how liturgical practices shaped medieval life, art, and literature—and why echoes of the liturgy still resound today in movie soundtracks, national ceremonies, and even the architecture around us. Gillhammer argues that far from being merely theological abstractions, liturgical forms were deeply human, and gave language to joy, grief, awe, and the cycles of time. We trace how those patterns wove themselves into everything from Michelangelo’s Pietà to John Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker Hill—and even to James Bond’s Skyfall. Far from being obscure or antique, liturgy turns out to be the roots of much what we take for granted.

Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy is published by Reaktion. Cosima Clara Gillhammer is Career Development Fellow in English at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. She teaches and researches medieval literature, culture, and liturgy.