Deepening the Christian identity celebrated in worship-- "Tim Sedgwick's Sacramental Ethics was a groundbreaking book that awaked us to the significance of religious practices for the moral like. We are, therefore, indebted to Augsburg Fortress for their willingness to make this work available for a new generation who has much to learn from this book." Stanley Hauerwas Duke Divinity School "This remarkable little book remains a classic, a wise and concrete reflection on the life of faith as a real way of life, grounded in the communal encounter with the grace of God in public worship. Look here to see again what word and sacrament have to do with daily life. Read here to think again how the paschal movement of Christ from death to life can pull us along, converting us to the care and embrace of the world." Gordon W. Lathrop Charles A. Schieren Professor of Liturgy Emeritus Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia "Timothy Sedgwick is the most imaginative and provocative moralist now writing in the American Anglican tradition. He's grounded and always has a fresh take on things. If Christian ethics in the United States is finally learning something about the importance of ritual and worship we largely have Tim to thank." David H. Smith Director, Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center "Sacramental Ethics sets Christian understanding and behavior where it belongs, in the Passover of Christ and of those whose faith lies in him from death to life." Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B. Timothy F. Sedgwick is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Vice President, and the Clinton S. Quin Professor of Christian Ethics at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria.

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.

What does consumerism have to do with the sacraments? We live in cultures where our senses of meaning, identity, and purpose are often found in what we purchase. Apart from the question of hedonism, there is the question of how we orient ourselves in an environment in which we end up marketing our very selves. In this book, Timothy Brunk examines how this consumer culture has had a corrosive effect on the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. He also assesses how sacramental worship can provide resources for responsible Christian discipleship in today's consumer culture.

This work comes at an opportune hour: a time in which many complain that contemporary theology lacks a general theory of sacraments. Chauvet charts a reorientation in sacramental theology from the scholastic treatments, which appropriated the metaphysical categories of causality and substance to develop an essentially instrumentalist appreciation of grace, in favor of an approach through the category of symbol." In this approach the subject is as much "grasped" (and transformed) by the symbolic representation as is the object being interpreted. Chauvet commands a wealth of scholarship which he deploys to powerful effect. His work in developing a foundational theology of sacramentality will remain the standard for years to come. "

Cooke reflects on the sacramental liturgies and their relation to love and freedom, reconciliation and concerned service to one another. Includes discussion questions, a bibliography, and an index.

Although scholars have widely acknowledged the prevalence of religious reference in the work of Cormac McCarthy, this is the first book on the most pervasive religious trope in all his works: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. Informed by postmodern theories of narrative and Christian theologies of sacrament, Matthew Potts reads the major novels of Cormac McCarthy in a new and insightful way, arguing that their dark moral significance coheres with the Christian theological tradition in difficult, demanding ways. Potts develops this account through an argument that integrates McCarthy's fiction with both postmodern theory and contemporary fundamental and sacramental theology. In McCarthy's novels, the human self is always dispossessed of itself, given over to harm, fate, and narrative. But this fundamental dispossession, this vulnerability to violence and signs, is also one uniquely expressed in and articulated by the Christian sacramental tradition. By reading McCarthy and this theology alongside postmodern accounts of action, identity, subjectivity, and narration, Potts demonstrates how McCarthy exploits Christian theology in order to locate the value of human acts and relations in a way that mimics the dispossessing movement of sacramental signs. This is not to claim McCarthy for theology, necessarily, but it is to assert that McCarthy generates his account of what human goodness might look like in the wake of metaphysical collapse through the explicit use of Christian theology.

There is today a dramatic reexamination of structure, authority, dogma -- indeed, every aspect of the life of the Church is held up to scrutiny. Welcoming this as a sign of vitality, Avery Dulles has carefully studied the writings of contemporary Protestant and Catholic ecclesiologists and sifted out six major approaches, or "models," through which the Church's character can be understood: as Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald, Servant, and, in a recent addition to the book, as Community of Disciples. A balanced theology, he concludes, must incorporate the major affirmations of each. "The method of models or types," observes Cardinal Dulles, "can have great value in helping people to get beyond the limitations of their own particular outlook and to enter into fruitful conversation with others... Such conversation is obviously essential if ecumenism is to get beyond its present impasses." This new edition includes a new Appendix and Preface by the author.

Theology after Heidegger must take into account history and language as elements in the pursuit of meaning. Quite often, this prompts a hurried flight from metaphysics to an embrace of an absence at the centre of Christian narrativity. Conor Sweeneyhere explores the 'postmodern' critique of presence in the context of sacramental theology, engaging the thought of Louis-Marie Chauvet and Lieven Boeve. Chauvet is an influential postmodern theologian whose critique of the perceived onto-theological constitution of presence in traditional sacramental theology has made big waves, while Boeve is part of a more recent generation of theologians who even more wholeheartedly embrace postmodern consequences for theology. Sweeney considers the extentto which postmodernism a la Heidegger upsets the hermeneutics of sacramentality, asking whether this requires us to renounce the search for a presence that by definition transcends us. Against both the fetishisation of presence and absence, Sweeney argues that metaphysics has a properly sacramental basis, and that it is only through this reality that the dialectic of presence and absence can be transcended. The case is made for the full but restless signification of the mother's smile as the paradigm for genuine sacramental presence.