The love poems of a late California poet. In Open the Blind, he wrote, "The endless sky, the small earth / The shadow cone / Your shining / Lips and eyes / Your thighs drenched with the sea / A telescope full of fireflies / Innumerable nebulae all departing / Ten billion years before we ever / met."

Moore asserts that Christian vocation, and the teaching vocation in particular, can be best understood as sacramental, mediating the grace of God through ordinary creation for the sanctification of human life and the well-being of all creation. She develops her argument through three important factors: a historical-theological analysis of the Christian sacraments and sacramentality; a phenomenological study of teaching events; and a description of six sacramental movements and corresponding teaching practices informed by Jewish-Christian traditions and Eucharistic practices. The nine detailed chapters include: Searching for the Sacred; Sacred Teaching; Education as Sacrament; Expecting the Unexpected; Remembering the Dismembered; Seeking Reversals; Giving Thanks; Nourishing Life; Reconstructing Community and Repairing the World; and Mapping the Future of Sacramental Teaching. "Teaching as a Sacramental Act" is ideal for students, pastors, Christian educators, spiritual directors, and pastoral caregivers who want to rethink and reshape the teaching ministry of the church.

As David deSilva has experienced the ancient wisdom of the Book of Common Prayer, he's been formed spiritually in deep and lasting ways. In these pages, he offers you a brand new way to use the Book of Common Prayer, exploring how Christians can be spiritually formed by the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, marriage and last rites.

Christians tend to divide into three camps: evangelical, sacramental, and pentecostal. But must we choose between them? Drawing on the New Testament, Christian history, and years of experience in Christian ministry, Gordon T. Smith argues that the church not only can be all three, but in fact must be all three in order to truly be the church.

This Handbook introduces the theology of the sacraments from a variety of perspectives. It contains historical overviews, biblical discussion, philosophical and theological reflection, as well as ecumenical discussion. It is one of the most comprehensive overviews of the sacraments throughout the tradition of the Christian church.

Catholic sacramental doctrine has lost much of its credibility. Baptized people leave the church, adolescents stop attending shortly after they are confirmed, supposedly indissoluble marriages regularly dissolve, few go to confession, and many do not believe in transubstantiation. Drawing upon his decades-long study of the sacraments, Martos reveals how teachings that seemed rooted in the scriptures and Catholic life have become unmoored from the contexts in which they arose, and why seemingly eternal truths are actually historically relative. After carefully constructing Catholic teaching from the church's own documents, he deconstructs it by demonstrating how biblical passages were misconstrued by patristic authors and how patristic writings were misunderstood by medieval scholastics. The long process of misinterpretation culminated in the dogmatic pronouncements of the Council of Trent, which continues to dominate Catholic thinking about the church's religious ceremonies. If the sacraments are released from their dogmatic baggage, Martos believes that the spiritual realities they symbolize can be celebrated in any human culture without being tied to their traditional rites.

Distinguished theologians and literary scholars explore the workings of the sacred and the sacramental in language and literature. What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? This volume develops the theory of “sacramental poetics” advanced by Regina Schwartz in her 2008 book on English Reformation writers, taking the theory in new directions while demonstrating how enduring and widespread this poetics is. Toward a Sacramental Poetics addresses two urgent questions we have inherited from a half century of secular critical thought. First, how do we understand the relationship between word and thing, sign and signified, other than as some naive direct representation or as a completely arbitrary language game? And, second, how can the subject experience the world beyond instrumentalizing it? The contributors conclude that a sacramental poetics responds to both questions, offering an understanding of the sign that, by pointing beyond itself, suggests wonder. The contributors explore a variety of topics in relation to sacramental poetics, including political theology, miracles, modernity, translation and transformation, and the metaphysics of love. They draw from diverse resources, from Dante to Hopkins, from Richard Hooker to Stoker's Dracula, from the King James Bible to Wallace Stevens. Toward a Sacramental Poetics is an important contribution to studies of religion and literature, the sacred and the secular, literary theory, and theologies of aesthetics. Contributors: Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Rowan Williams, Subha Mukherji, Stephen Little, Kevin Hart, John Milbank, Hent de Vries, Jean-Luc Marion, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Lori Branch, and Paul Mariani.

Over 3 million copies sold! Essential reading for Catholics of all walks of life. Here it is - the first new Catechism of the Catholic Church in more than 400 years, a complete summary of what Catholics around the world commonly believe. The Catechism draws on the Bible, the Mass, the Sacraments, Church tradition and teaching, and the lives of saints. It comes with a complete index, footnotes and cross-references for a fuller understanding of every subject. The word catechism means "instruction" - this book will serve as the standard for all future catechisms. Using the tradition of explaining what the Church believes (the Creed), what she celebrates (the Sacraments), what she lives (the Commandments), and what she prays (the Lord's Prayer), the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers challenges for believers and answers for all those interested in learning about the mystery of the Catholic faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a positive, coherent and contemporary map for our spiritual journey toward transformation.

Ganoczy provides a complete overview of the history of Catholic sacramental theology and a clear explanation of contemporary theological developments. The classical teaching of the Council of Trent and its later theological formulations are compared to the new theological language of the Second Vatican Council and the personalist theologies of modern thinkers such as Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx. Introduction to Catholic Sacramental Theology moves clearly from (1) a sketch of the historical development of the sacramental concept, to (2) the basic elements in a general theory of the sacraments, to (3) discussion of the individual sacraments. In the last chapter, the author introduces his own expanded understanding of the sacraments. Using the concepts of modern communication theory, he envisions the sacraments as events of communication in the life of the concrete faith community in which each sacrament has its own particular form and purpose.