Drawing on performance studies and sacramental and liturgical theology, Ruthanna B. Hooke develops a theology of proclamation grounded in the body’s experience of preaching. The author explores the claim that preaching is a sacramental event of communion with the triune God by comparing the steps involved in voice production with the fourfold shape of the Eucharist. This comparison yields a description of preaching as an event of self-offering that allows space for the humanity of the preacher and as an encounter with the Holy Spirit that is communal and prophetic. Preaching draws participants into Christ’s dying and rising, and hence into a mode of power known in vulnerability. Calling hearers into the eschatological event of the resurrection, preaching inherently moves toward proclamation on political and ethical issues. Hooke uses this theological framework to offer ways of preaching on environmental crisis and on racism. The author calls preachers to embodied engagement with preaching and describes a way for preachers to bear witness to Jesus Christ not only in the content of their proclamation, but in their way of being in the preaching event.

The second biannual congress of the Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology (LEST II, Nov. 3-6, 1999) was dedicated to a fundamental theological reflection on the question of how to conceive of 'sacramental presence in a postmodern context'. This volume contains the main lectures presented at the conference, as well as the formal responses to those lectures and a selection of supplementary papers. These papers examine the Christian claim that God is present in human history, in the light of the contemporary rethinking of the relationship between transcendence and immanence. In addition to an extensive introductory paper by L. Boeve, contributions include, among others, M.-C. Bingemer, L.-M. Chauvet, G. De Schrijver, K. Hart, W. Jeanrond, F. Kerr, J.-Y. Lacoste, T. Merrigan, P. Moyaert, D. Power, I. Verhack and G. Ward.

Theology after Heidegger must take into account history and language as constitutive elements in the pursuit of meaning. Quite often, this prompts a hurried flight from metaphysics to an embrace of an absence at the center of Christian narrativity. In this book, Conor Sweeney 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 extent to 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 fetishization 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.

This is the first comprehensive book on the architecture and imagery of late medieval sacrament houses, those dazzlingly complex microarchitectural structures designed for the paraliturgical reservation and display of the eucharistic and 'real present' body of Christ. The study is embedded in a discussion of sacramental theology and devotion, and traces the development of this genre of furnishing from the introduction of the Corpus Christi feast in 1264 to the first decades of the Counter-Reformation, from the Low Countries to Hungary and the Saxon settlements of Transylvania, from the Swedish island of Gotland to the Swiss Canton of Graubunden. Much of the argument is devoted to such major sacrament houses as those in Leuven's Pieterskerk (1450) or St. Lorenz in Nuremberg (1493-6), though provincial solutions like the dugout tabernacles of the Brandenburg Marches are equally considered. The book is intended as a contribution to the study of both Gothic microarchitecture and the role of the visual in late medieval devotional culture.

Christianity Today Book Award Winner This work argues that the heart of patristic exegesis is the attempt to find the sacramental reality (real presence) of Christ in the Old Testament Scriptures. Leading theologian Hans Boersma discusses numerous sermons and commentaries of the church fathers to show how they regarded Christ as the treasure hidden in the field of the Old Testament and explains that the church today can and should retrieve the sacramental reading of the early church. Combining detailed scholarly insight with clear, compelling prose, this book makes a unique contribution to contemporary interest in theological interpretation.

Offering a decisive challenge to the older reception of Pusey as a paragon of backwards scholarship, Tobias A. Karlowicz argues that Pusey is properly understood as a penetrating and original theologian whose work anticipated contemporary conversations about the nature of theology, and a pivotal figure in the history of Anglican theology. Karlowicz locates the heart of Pusey's project in a theological perception which looks through the physicality and concreteness of language, to discern Christ at the centre of both Scripture and the physical creation. This 'sacramental vision,' which grew from Pusey's critique of Christianity's decay and his formative engagement with patristic hermeneutics and ontology, forms his teaching on the sacraments as vehicles for a Christian life of eucharistic self-oblation in union with Christ, and demonstrates the relevance of his thought to contemporary theology.