Christian proclamation, says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is the living Christ walking among the people. Preachers know that Jesus is the living Word, and that the Spirit of Jesus animates the preaching event. Preaching is an epiclesis, an invocation of the Holy Spirit over God's holy people. As such, it must touch their imagination. Pastro proposes that preaching is the living ecclesial presence of Jesus Christ, Sacramental Word of the God of the poor. The Word speaks from the imagination of the poor-the economic poor, but also the "new poor" of the twenty-first century: entire indigenous cultures, women, those marginalized because of their sexuality, undocumented immigrants in dominant cultures, and many others. All Christian preachers in every context are called to solidarity with the poor.

We are here on earth not to guard a museum but to cultivate a garden flourishing with life and promised to a glorious future, John XXIII exhorted the Church at the dawn of the Second Vatican Council. In an age when some skeptics suggest that the reformed liturgy has lost the wonder and spiritual depth of previous ages, Standing Together in the Community of God affirms that we need not look back; the Sacred Mysteries are already in our midst. Their wellspring and summit is the heart of God, shared in the Trinity's own communion, announced now as pure Gift. Praising God for God's saving acts in Jesus, as Vatican II reminded us, we encounter Christ's sacramental presence in four modes: in the person of the priest who gathers the community into communion, in the elements and actions of the sacraments, in the word proclaimed and preached, and in the assembly praying and singing (SC #7). In rhythm and harmony, these modes invite us to encounter the multivalent depth of the Mysteries that announce Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col 1:27). Together they proclaim the Risen One among us, the totus Christus, hope for a hungry world. Allowing each mode its respect as a bearer of the sacred, these focal words and actions in the liturgy echo a communion song that announces Christ's real presence to us and for us and with us. Beginning deep within, this is a spirituality and piety for the twenty-first century, ever ancient and ever new.

This book proposes a theology of preaching from the perspective of the poor. Traditional homiletic methodology concentrates on the "how" of preaching. Pastro maintains that the real question for a renewal of preaching is theological, the "who" of the preaching. The center of the "who" is the Triune God living in the poor community.

Almost 500 years ago, a Mexica survivor of the conquista was on his way to catechism lessons just outside present-day Mexico City. He experienced a holy presence on the hill of Tepeyac that changed the hermeneutic of the dignity of the poor forever. This book is about Our Lady of Guadalupe under her popular title “Santa María Tonantzin Guadalupe.” It centers on her indigenous and feminine identity as the “Preaching Woman.” She and the people she animates, the Hispanic-Latino community, are “icons” of the presence of the Holy Trinity. As Sacrament of the Holy Spirit and bearer of the Sacramental Word, she enables the pueblo, the people of God, to exercise their baptismal ministry as holy preachers.

Montesinos’ Legacy brings scholars together in honor of the 500th anniversary of Dominican Antonio de Montesinos’ famous sermon in defense of the rights of the indigenous Amerindians. The collection addresses the historical context for this sermon, but also the continued relevance of Montesinos today. Antonio de Montesinos’ Legacy examines the origins of human rights concepts in the West, the rights of indigenous peoples, the role of the Church in human rights, and human rights in Latin America.

By Water and the Spirit, a 6-session study guide for use in small groups, contains the full text of the paper "By Water and the Spirit," which describes the United Methodist understanding of baptism approved by the 1996 General Conference. This booklet serves as a resource for congregational leaders who are helping members make connections between the baptismal covenant and discipleship in daily life.

The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton explains the astonishing centrality of the eucharist to poets with a variety of denominational affiliations, writing on a range of subjects, across an extended period in literary history. Whether they are praying, thinking about politics, lamenting unrequited love, or telling fart jokes, late medieval and early modern English poets return again and again to the eucharist as a way of working out literary problems. Tracing this connection from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, this book shows how controversies surrounding the nature of signification in the sacrament informed understandings of poetry. Connecting medieval to early modern England, it presents a history of 'eucharistic poetics' as it appears in the work of seven key poets: the Pearl-poet, Chaucer, Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton. Reassessing this range of poetic voices, The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization overturns an oft-repeated argument that early modern poetry's fascination with the eucharist resulted from the Protestant rejection of transubstantiation and its supposedly enchanted worldview. Instead of this tired secularization story, it fleshes out a more capacious conception of eucharistic presence, showing that what interested poets about the eucharist was its insistence that the mechanics of representation are always entangled with the self's relation to the body and to others. The book thus forwards a new historical account of eucharistic poetics, placing this literary phenomenon within a longstanding negotiation between embodiment and disembodiment in Western religious and cultural history.