2021 Catholic Media Association Award first place award in Catholic Social Teaching In The Meal That Reconnects, Dr. Mary McGann, RSCJ, invites readers to a more profound appreciation of the sacredness of eating, the planetary interdependence that food and the sharing of food entails, and the destructiveness of the industrial food system that is supplying food to tables globally. She presents the food crisis as a spiritual crisis—a call to rediscover the theological, ecological, and spiritual significance of eating and to probe its challenge to Christian eucharistic practice. Drawing on the origins of Eucharist in Jesus’s meal fellowship and the worship of early Christians, McGann invites communities to reclaim the foundational meal character of eucharistic celebration while offering pertinent strategies for this renewal.

The food-secure and/or privileged worldwide no longer eat and drink simply to maintain life itself. They have the advantage and choice to regard "sustenance" not just as fuel for the body/machine but as a source of pleasure and entertainment for the mind/intellect. This enhanced concept of "sustenance" embraces all the senses: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile, thus including not just food & drink but ceremonies & art forms dealing with them. This book explores the substantive ways food & drink impact human existence. The work comprises five parts: medicine; ceremonies; literature & cinema; art & artists; space/architecture & advertising/art. Food & drink start with the physical, morph into nutrition, the most basic requirements for organic life, but progress from the beginning of physical process to ceremony and expression. The result and the experience highlight physiological and sensual concepts, and indeed, preference. Food & drink staples are determined by geographic availability and cuisine & beverage are closely associated with culture & ethnicity. Contributor exploration is wide-ranging: Aztec, Mexican & Spanish medicine; African & Roman Catholic rites; cookbook discourse and socio-gender influence; literature, including cultural comparisons of cooking and cooks; preparation & representation of food & drink as artistic endeavours, including by Latin American women, and types of inspirational "fodder", especially in the context of Picasso's art in Spain & France, & Spanish wine museums & labelling. Sustenance for the Body & Soul is the seventh book in the Hispanic Worlds series, details of which are available on the press website.

"On the path: spirituality for youth and adults is a seven-to-ten-session structured program that explores the nature and meaning of spirituality in the lives of youth and adults. It is designed for use by groups of 15-to-18-year-old youths, college-age people, and adults. The program requires a minimum of six participants; the ideal group size is 8 to 12 participants and two leaders"--Introd.

This work offers an overview of trauma theory’s relations to biblical studies. In addition to summarizing the theoretical landscape(s), it provides exegetical forays into Ezekiel and, in part, Exodus and the Eucharist. The analysis will engage these materials’ traumatic ethoi, including their connections to trauma informed eating and queerings, so as to offer entryways into the wider critical conversation. While these exegetical foci may seem arbitrary, that is in part the point. As readers will see, trauma defies sense-making. Akin to postmodernist poststructuralist intertextualities, trauma cannot be flattened into neat narration. Trauma is capricious, leaving survivors to carry with them multivalent and even paradoxical connections to their experiences. This project thus attempts to perform trauma’s plurisignification as much as it tries to explain it, using a set of traditionally unexamined pairings to do so. While not an exhaustive survey on trauma theory and the Bible - such work could fill the space of multiple publications - the following work provides a representation of both the theory of trauma and its applications within the biblical field.

No other encyclical has generated as much conversation—both Catholic and non-Catholic—as Laudato si’. Often forgotten in these conversations is the theological heart and eucharistic vision of the encyclical and its integral ecology. Even the title of Laudato si’—“Praised be!”—signals the centrality of right praise in caring for our common home. Using Bernard Lonergan’s theology of history, this book unearths the doxological, eucharistic vision that shapes the encyclical’s integral presentation of social and ecological conversion. It offers the first book-length study that recovers the eucharistic nature of Laudato si’. In drawing out the eucharistic vision of Laudato si’, the book accomplishes several feats for the reader. It roots the eucharistic dimensions of the encyclical in the writings of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, showing how Pope Francis develops their thought in notable ways. It introduces Bernard Lonergan’s theology of history, showing how his framework can capture the eucharistic contours of caring for our common home; so too, in light of Laudato si’, does the book expand his theology of history to incorporate both ecological concern and the doxological, eucharistic essence of the church. The book assembles a liturgically shaped, systematic account of the church’s social mission. It joins poles otherwise sundered in a polarized church and world: between worship and justice, between concerns for human life and concerns for the natural world. Realizing the eucharistic vision of Laudato si’ promises much for our contemporary moment. Pope Francis recently observed that the integral ecology of Laudato si’ holds the key for the world’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Catholic Bishops recently launched a Eucharistic Revival that aims to rekindle eucharistic devotion and praxis. The Eucharistic Vision of Laudato Si’: Praise, Conversion, and Integral Ecology supplies a timely study that helps fulfill these intertwined calls.

People love their metaphors for the Bible. The Bible is a sword, a mirror, a script, a score, a cathedral, a rule book, a user’s manual, a lamp, a love letter. But how did metaphor, which in the eighteenth century was seen as a deceptive rhetorical trick, become such a prominent tool for speaking of Scripture? And how does one judge between a good metaphor and a bad one? This book explores the theological use of metaphor to describe the nature and interpretation of Scripture. It interrogates three such models—the Bible as musical score (Anthony Thiselton), the Bible as theo-dramatic script (Kevin Vanhoozer), and the Bible as light (John Feinberg)—seeking to evaluate their faithfulness to Scripture and church tradition, their fittingness to the current culture, and their fruitfulness for understanding and practicing the biblical text. The author then proposes and explores what he considers a better model, one drawn from the Bible itself, namely that of Scripture as food.