Sacramental Theology Theory and Practice from Multiple Perspectives
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Sacramental Theology Theory and Practice from Multiple Perspectives Edited by Bruce T. Morrill Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Sacramental Theology Sacramental Theology Theory and Practice from Multiple Perspectives Special Issue Editor Bruce T. Morrill MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Bruce T. Morrill Vanderbilt University USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) in 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/ sacramental) For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03921-718-2 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03921-719-9 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Bruce T. Morrill. c 2019 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii Preface to ”Sacramental Theology” ................................... ix Christina M. Gschwandtner Mystery Manifested: Toward a Phenomenology of the Eucharist in Its Liturgical Context Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 315, doi:10.3390/rel10050315 ................... 1 John W. Compton IV Creaturely Communal Ontology in Practice: John Zizioulas in Dialogue with Ritual Theory Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 506, doi:10.3390/rel10090506 ................... 19 David C. McDuffie The Epic of Evolution and a Theology of Sacramental Ecology Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 244, doi:10.3390/rel10040244 ................... 30 Edward Foley Sacramentality, Chaos Theory and Decoloniality Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 418, doi:10.3390/rel10070418 ................... 44 Hans Gustafson Pansacramentalism, Interreligious Theology, and Lived Religion Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 408, doi:10.3390/rel10070408 ................... 54 Rhodora Beaton Between the Center and the Margins: Young Catholics, “Sorta-Catholics,” and Baptismal Identity Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 512, doi:10.3390/rel10090512 ................... 69 Jonathan Stotts Obedience as Belonging: Catholic Guilt and Frequent Confession in America Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 370, doi:10.3390/rel10060370 ................... 85 Benjamin Durheim Converting Consumerism: A Liturgical-Ethical Application of Critical Realism Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 338, doi:10.3390/rel10050338 ...................105 Jason M. Smith Drones and Eucharist Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 407, doi:10.3390/rel10070407 ...................118 Lauren Smelser White The Sacrament of Revelation: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nuptial Encounter Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 495, doi:10.3390/rel10090495 ...................129 v About the Special Issue Editor Bruce T. Morrill, the Edward A. Malloy Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee), specializes in sacramental–liturgical theology, drawing upon a range of interdisciplinary resources in the fields of systematic and historical theology, ritual studies, cultural anthropology, and biblical studies. His other strongly related interest is in political theologies investigating the problems of suffering in social contexts. This work has come together most comprehensively in his books Divine Worship and Human Healing: Liturgical Theology at the Margins of Life and Death (Liturgical Press, 2009) and Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Liturgical Press, 2000). More recent titles include Encountering Christ in the Eucharist: The Paschal Mystery in People, Word, and Sacrament (Paulist Press, 2012) and The Essential Writings of Bernard Cooke: A Narrative Theology of Church, Sacrament, and Ministry (Paulist Press, 2016). His current research and writing projects include a typology of liturgical remembering and a mystical–political theology of Easter. A Jesuit priest, his academic degrees include an M.A. in anthropology (Columbia University) and Ph.D. in religion (Emory University). He has lectured widely in North America, Europe, and Australia, and is currently president of the North American Academy of Liturgy. vii Preface to ”Sacramental Theology” In the second half of the twentieth century, sacrament emerged as a vital topic within the ressourcement movements of Western European Catholic theology. This overlapped with the ecumenical liturgical movement already in progress for a half-century. Scholarship attentive to multiple sources in early Christianity—philosophical, historical, homiletic, liturgical, pastoral—rescued sacramental symbol and ritual from merely being an object of clerical ministration, passive lay reception, and canonical regulation to becoming a key for understanding divine human encounter in the mission of the church and the lives of its members. Recovering the ancient, as well as best of medieval, theology of sacramental rites as sacred mysteries, European and North American theologians enlisted contemporary phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophies to explain and promote sacraments not as clerically delivered objects but, rather, as profound human symbolic events of divine revelation. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the need for attention to the actual performance of specific rites and, thus, the need for historical, social–scientific, and other human disciplines—in addition to philosophy—had become well established. This now makes the work of sacramental theology an ongoing point of attention in multiple cross-disciplinary theories attentive to actual contexts, both historical and contemporary, of sacramental–liturgical practices. Insofar as Christian sacraments only exist in symbolic–ritual performances, the field of liturgical studies (itself multidisciplinary, including ritual and performance theories) has proven increasingly integral to sacramental–theological work. Attention to historical and current practices of Christian symbol and ritual (liturgy and sacraments) nonetheless returns continuously to philosophical–theological theories that meet the intellectual need to reflect upon divine presence and absence, personal and communal experiences of God, of Christ, of the Spirit, scripture and tradition, the ecclesial or communal dimension of sacramental celebrations, types of power at work in the rites, liturgical participation, and more. Thus, sacramental theology proves expansive in the range of the Christian existence it addresses, even as the bodily nature of the subject matter requires constant theoretical reconsiderations attentive to historical, social, and cultural contexts. The essays in this volume begin with profound philosophical perspectives on personal and communal sacramental experience, expanding from traditional cosmology to evolutionary and chaos theories of our planetary existence, continuing with shifts—especially among youth—to interreligious and non-institutional perspectives, then on to change in popular notions of guilt and social–ethical issues in relation to liturgical theology, so as finally to return to fundamental theological reflection on human sacramentality and divine revelation. Bruce T. Morrill Special Issue Editor ix religions Article Mystery Manifested: Toward a Phenomenology of the Eucharist in Its Liturgical Context Christina M. Gschwandtner Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458, USA; [email protected] Received: 15 April 2019; Accepted: 6 May 2019; Published: 9 May 2019 Abstract: This article explores three contemporary phenomenological analyses of the Eucharist by the French phenomenologists Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Emmanuel Falque, arguing that their descriptions are too excessive and individual, failing to take into account the broader liturgical context for eucharistic experience. The second part of the discussion seeks to develop an alternate phenomenological account of eucharistic experience that takes Eucharist seriously as a corporeal and communal phenomenon that is encountered within a liturgical horizon and which requires a liturgical intentionality to be prepared for and directed toward it. Keywords: Eucharist; liturgy; phenomenology; Jean-Luc Marion; Jean-Yves Lacoste; Emmanuel Falque Philosophical reflection on the sacraments—especially the Eucharist—has a long history. Aquinas employs and alters Aristotelian categories of substance and accidents for his account of a eucharistic ontology; Descartes discusses the impact of new insights in physics on the epistemology of the Eucharist in several letters to Marin de Mersenne; Leibniz tries to reconcile Lutherans and Calvinists with a “monadic” interpretation of eucharistic substance; Hegel employs a natural philosophy of the living organism as an argument for a Lutheran interpretation of the Eucharist as sacramental reality (Alexandrescu 2007; Backus 2011; Fouke 1992; Finn 2015–2016). Such philosophical explications of