This book is envisioned as a follow up to Stookey's successful Baptism: Christ's Act in the Church, published in 1982. It will provide historical--theological perspective in a style that is "popular," rather than academically heavy; and, it will be ecumenical in scope, but with a concentration on Protestantism. The shared Calvinian eucharistic tradition of Presbyterians, UCC, and Methodists will be particularly explored. It will also provide material pertinent to preaching, study of the eucharist by laity, and practical local reform that implements recent revisions of denominational rites.

The central thesis of the book is that there is a distinctive Wesleyan eucharistic spirituality. Looking at Wesleys's eucharistic practices, theology and sources, the writer identifies a spirituality that has a number of key themes. These revolve around the dynamic encounter with a personal Christ, the grace filled life, the therapeutic growth towards holiness and wholenes. They provide a way of looking at life and the formation of characters which may conform to the image of the Christ. While there were several reasons for the decline of Weslyean eucharistic spirituality after the death of the Wesleys, the writer maintains that this spirituality can be rediscovered, revived and communicated in new forms so as to impact Methodists around the world who are facing the challenges of the 21st century. The author is a pastor in a Methodist Church in Singapore.

Recover the Eucharist for church and ministry.

Bryan Spinks is one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of liturgy and to have a comprehensive work by him on the Eucharist is a major catch for SCM. Like the author’s previous work on Baptism, this will become a standard work about the Eucharist and Eucharistic theology worldwide. The book, a study of the history and theology of the Eucharist, is the fifth volume in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series and will help to establish the series as a place for landmark books of liturgical scholarship.

Dom Jeremy Driscoll offers a fresh approach both to theology and to the eucharistic celebration itself. He sets forth and develops here a method for the tasks of academic theology inspired by the eucharistic rite. There are studies of the foundational role of the liturgy for conceiving the identity of fundamental theology; a proposal for developing a curriculum on the basis of the shape of the eucharistic rite; historical studies on the relationship between liturgy and doctrine; and suggestions for catechesis, preaching and eucharistic adoration. Dom Jeremy writes: ' for virtually all of my life as a monk and a theologian, and already from the time when I was a student, have found ongoing inspiration for my work in the regular celebration of the eucharist. To come back to it again and again, no matter from what particular theme I may have been studying, was to enter a context in which whatever I had learned was secured and deepened at a new level, a context in which I could enter the adoration that helped me express my love for what I was learning. To celebrate eucharist often confirmed what I had learned - not directly but by means of signs, symbols, ritual action, and a different kind of language . . .' Jeremy Driscoll was born in Moscow, Idaho, USA and has been a Benedictine monk of Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon since 1973. Author of three books and fifteen scholarly articles on Evagrius Ponticus and related aspects of Egyptian monasticism, he has also written widely on liturgical questions. He teaches at Mount Angel Seminary and at the Pontifical Atheneum of Saint' Anselmo in Rome.