Tracing developments in sacramental theology over the past twenty-five years, this study explores a growing ecumenical dynamism in both the academic study of sacramentality and its centrality in pastoral applications. But how does ecumenical excitement in a renewed discovery of sacramental theology fit with different theologies of church and different pastoral beliefs and practices? How does the universality of academic accessibility in the form of an expansive ecumenical sharing of perspectives meet the particularities of pastoral reality and ecclesial polity? Arguing in favor of fruitful ecumenical conversation, this book also focuses on the crucial interaction of ecclesiology, liturgical practice, and sacramentality, which raises the need for a creative tension between the particularities of a given ecclesial system and the catholicity of Christian sacramentality. Using Anglican sacramental theologies and Anglicanism as vehicles of exploration, this study contributes to an overview of the state of the field of sacramental theology in the twenty-first century while challenging the assumption that one size fits all. In sacramental theology, as in other important areas of Christian life, unity in diversity may be the basis for authentic lived sacramentality.

Steeped in the Catholic spiritual tradition, The Sacramentality of Music argues that musical experience, in its appeal to the entirety of the human person, can serve as a locus of encounter with the divine and an occasion of God’s self-revelation in love, with spiritually nurturing, ultimately transformative, ends. Christina Labriolacontends that this dynamic might most aptly be understood as sacramental, an all-encompassing perspective of the cosmos permeated by the divine creative, salvific, sustaining presence. Through its participation in the mysteries of beauty and creativity, its bodily and affective engagement, and impact on the inner life, music operates sacramentally: manifesting divine realities through the tangible stuff of human experience. In a thematic theological exploration that interweaves pastoral theology, theological aesthetics, and mysticism, the reader is invited to contemplate music’s sacramental potentiality and to engage the sacramentally charged music of Beethoven, Bartok, MacMillan, Messiaen, Mozart, Ešenvalds, Bach, Pärt, and Hildegard. In attending to musical ways of relating to God, this book invites readers into a deepening awareness of the sacramental nature of reality itself as that in which the spiritual resonance of music is grounded and reveals afresh, taking musical beauty seriously in the spiritual order with repercussions for Christian living.

Introducing readers to the contemporary field of sacramental theology, this volume covers the biblical and historical foundations, a survey of the state of the discipline, and a collection of constructive essays representing major themes, practices and approaches to sacraments and sacramentality in the contemporary world. The volume starts with a set of foundational essays that offer broad introduction to the field of sacramental theology from contemporary scholars, analysing a number of historical figures in order to illumine and inform contemporary sacramental theology. The second part of the volume is dedicated to a series of essays on sacramentality, and includes attention to elements of space, time, ritual action, music, and word, all as aspects of what Christians have termed “sacramental” reality. The third set of essays includes attention to each of the seven practices that have most commonly been termed “sacraments” in Christian traditions: baptism; eucharist/Lord's Supper; confirmation; confession, forgiveness and reconciliation; marriage; ordination; and anointing. The final part of this volume features scholars who are working on sacraments in conversation with contemporary academic disciplines: critical race theory, queer theory, comparative theology, and disability studies.

An exploration—and an affirmation—of the connection between the Church’s sacraments of initiation.​ Inviting the unbaptized to participate in the Eucharist has become an increasingly common practice in churches, as Christian communities explore ways to use the sacraments as an expression of openness and service. In this volume, sacramental theologian Shawn Strout reconsiders this trend. Arguing from church history, sacramental theology, and liturgical practice, Strout shows how baptism and the Eucharist form an indissoluble bond that is central to Christian initiation and community. The book’s conclusion turns to pastoral considerations and ecumenical relationships, showing the significance of the traditional ordo of baptism and Eucharist for the church. An important text for clergy, scholars, and church leaders, Bound Together: Baptism, Eucharist, and the Church offers important reflections on an issue of pressing concern.

This book offers Hugh of Saint Victor’s early scholastic thoughts on sacrament in order to re-discover the pre-modern theological understanding of ontological signification. The Christian understanding of sacrament through the category of ‘signs’ results in a theology that inherently shares in the philosophical notion of semiotics. Yet, through the advent of post-structuralism, current sign-theory is effectively shaped by post-Kantian, ontological foundations. This can lead to misinterpretations of the sacramental theology that predates this intellectual turn. The book works within a context of Christological, realist mysticism. Such an approach allows mutually informing debates in semiotic development and studies on sacramental theology to sit side-by-side. In addition, as a work of ressourcement, influenced by the methodology and concerns of the historical, French Ressourcement, this study seeks to continue an engagement with some of the most promising sacramental positions that have emerged throughout twentieth-century theology, particularly with the revival of interest in Victorine theology. By providing an examination of sacramentality and theories of signification in the early scholastic theology of Hugh of Saint Victor, this book gives fresh impetus to the theology surrounding sacrament. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of mysticism, theologians of sacrament, philosophical theologians, and philosophers of religion.

James Greenaway offers a philosophical guide to understanding, affirming, and valuing the significance of belonging across personal, political, and historical dimensions of existence. A sense of belonging is one of the most meaningful experiences of anyone’s life. Inversely, the discovery that one does not belong can be one of the most upsetting experiences. In A Philosophy of Belonging, Greenaway treats the notion of belonging as an intrinsically philosophical one. After all, belonging raises intense questions of personal self-understanding, identity, mortality, and longing; it confronts interpersonal, sociopolitical, and historical problems; and it probes our relationship with both the knowable world and transcendent mystery. Experiences of alienation, exclusion, and despair become conspicuous only because we are already moved by a primordial desire to belong. Greenaway presents a hermeneutical framework that brings the intelligibility of belonging into focus and discusses the works of various representative thinkers in light of this hermeneutic. The study is divided into two main parts, “Presence” and “Communion.” In the first, Greenaway considers the abiding presence of the cosmos as the context of personhood and the world, followed by the presence of persons to themselves and others by way of consciousness and embodiment, culminating in a discussion of the unrestricted horizon of meaning that love makes present in persons. In the second part, belonging in community is explored as a crucial type of communion that is both politically and historically structured. Moreover, communion has direction and a quality of sacredness that offers itself for consideration. Greenaway concludes with a discussion of the consequences of refusing presence and communion, and what is involved in the repudiation of belonging.

This volume brings together an ecumenical team of scholars to present key theological concepts related to worship to help readers articulate their own theology of worship. Contributors explore the history of theology's impact on worship practices across the Christian tradition, highlighting themes such as creation, pneumatology, sanctification, and mission. The book includes introductions by N. T. Wright and Nicholas Wolterstorff. A forthcoming volume will address the historical foundations of worship.

This title was first published in 2001. This text examines sexuality and interpersonal relationships in relation to the Catholic Church. Topics discussed include spirituality; sexuality; bodiliness and sacramentality; the female experience of sexuality; authority; and the development of Catholic tradition and sexual morality.

The reform of the liturgy has dramatically changed the way Roman Catholics and all Christians understand their worship. The arena of the encounter has shifted from a passive experience of observation of the great Mysteries to one that invites active participation on many levels. Yet, the imagination of many who preach, preside, and gather to worship continues to be shaped by a passive model as well as by the notion of sacramental activity as a product to be received or given. In The Holy Preaching, Janowiak deepens the discussion of Christ's presence in the Word by offering reflection on the disparity between the theology and the practice of preaching and some explanation as to why that disparity exists.

In a sacramental ecology, divine grace is to be found in the evolutionary emergence of life. The ‘Epic of Evolution’ is the scientific story that reveals that we live in an approximately 14 billion year old universe on a planet that is approximately 4.6 billion years old and that we are a part of the ongoing process of life that has existed on Earth for roughly 4 billion years. Nature's Sacrament focuses on the religious and ecological significance of the evolutionary epic in an effort to seamlessly connect the ecological value attributed as a part of an understanding of the evolutionary connectedness of life on Earth, with the Divine grace understood to be present in Christian sacramental worship. David C. McDuffie is a faculty member in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where his primary teaching schedule includes courses in World Religions, Religion in America, Christian History, Religion and Environment, and Religion and Politics. Broadly, his research and teaching interests involve the subject area of Religion and Culture, which includes but is not limited to the relationships between religion and politics, science, and health care. This is his first book.