Melanie C. Ross presents the various shapes of Christian liturgies that emerged in non-mainstream Protestant churches, including Quakerism, Anabaptism, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and Evangelicalism. Despite the prejudice that these traditions are non-liturgical, she demonstrates the profound theological and spiritual depth of their worship services.

In this chapter, I set the stage for understanding how the Shepherd conceptualizes God as an enslaver and the role of the holy spirit in the maintenance of the enslaved–enslaver relationship. I begin by demonstrating how the Shepherd portrays the holy spirit as a somatic entity sent by God that dwells within the bodies of God’s enslaved persons and is called “the enslaver who dwells within you,” who is capable of influencing behaviors, reporting back to God, and leaving the body if frustrated. The human body itself is imagined to be a porous entity in which various spirits, including the holy spirit and other passion-causing spirits, can dwell. I explore how the Shepherd portrays the body of God’s enslaved persons as a vessel with a limited amount of space, within which spirits compete for room and control and upon which God’s enslaved are encouraged to act obediently in order to remain under the purview of the enslaving holy spirit.

Cas Wepener argues that there is a closer connection between liturgics and homiletics than one usually assumes. The proclamation of the Word has always been a crucial part of the Church’s liturgical services, but, maybe more significantly, it continues to co-shape the contexts in which its relevance can be shown and lived.

Chapter 7 offers a culminating test for competing rationalities, given how thoroughly Julian’s and Cyril’s texts are focused on re-narrating episodes from their rival. It returns to three specific arguments to consider if MacIntyre’s further claim about incommensurable forms of reasoning obtains in Julian’s and Cyril’s engagement. Three case studies in rationality, focusing on words (genētos, pronoia, and pistis) used by Julian and Cyril at crucial points in their reasoning, provide occasion to query whether non-intersecting forms of reasoning are at play in these specific arguments. Intellectual impasses on particular topics can suggest, after all, that the traditions inhabited by individuals engaged in intellectual conflict are more broadly incommensurable.

While the previous chapters paid attention to the Christian West, Alexander Alexopoulos introduces the wealth, beauty, and variety of Eastern Christian traditions. They comprise not only immensely diverse geographical areas, from Armenia to Ethiopia and from Lebanon to India, but also intriguing histories and denominational differences.

Liborius Olaf Lumma sheds light on the Church’s daily prayer, previously called the Divine Office in the West, now known as the Liturgy of the Hours. He sketches their emergence and historical development in different cultural realms, but not without sounding how intrinsically important the hours are for Christian worship as a whole.

To clarify further the dynamics of the inter-tradition conflict between Cyril and Julian, Chapter 8 turns from Against Julian to Cyril’s similarly named Against Nestorius. These two texts are strikingly similar, almost as if Cyril followed a formal rubric by which to write polemical treatises. Yet Julian was a Hellene, and Nestorius (notwithstanding some of Cyril’s snide intimations) a Christian. Juxtaposing Cyril’s two polemical treatises allows us to see more clearly the inter-tradition narrative conflict with Julian in contrast with the intra-tradition conflict with Nestorius. Cyril and Nestorius presume the same narrative framework, and vis-à-vis the out-narrating dynamic of Cyril’s and Julian’s engagement, the course of their arguments and shape of their rationality show it, even as they reach diametrically opposed conclusions on a question central to their tradition. The chapter concludes with a list of likely features that will mark texts advancing narrative conflict.

Gilles Drouin goes through the history of church architecture and identifies some profound shifts with far-reaching liturgical, theological, and pastoral implications. He concludes that churches today need above all to be hospitable places that further the always renewing encounter between God and humankind.

Thomas Pott takes as a point of departure the gospel’s unmistakable call for the unity of the Body of Christ. This leads him to reflect on several issues over which there is division in the Church. However, none of these issues is capable of endangering the fact that the liturgy bears, manifests, and transmits ecclesial unity uniquely and fundamentally.

The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.

Patrick Prétot comments on the individual parts of which the celebration of the Eucharist consists. For that, he takes as his point of departure the script of the Order of Mass, which is used in the Roman Catholic Church but which shows many commonalities with other liturgical and ecclesial traditions.

This chapter, the first of two devoted to Julian’s Against the Galileans, begins by mapping the narrative structure of Julian’s text. It then traces Julian’s first major step in re-narrating the Christian tradition: casting the ancient Hebrew tradition as existing harmoniously within the broad contours of the Hellenic tradition. Focusing on Moses’s teachings about the creation of the cosmos and about its governance by a hierarchy of gods, Julian shows that the Hebrew tradition, though not terribly impressive, has teachings compatible with Julian’s Hellenic tradition

Focusing on the often too easily neglected concept of piety, Job Getcha sheds light on the natural bond between liturgy and spirituality. It would be erroneous to see them simply as the objective or communal and subjective or individual sides of the same reality, since an argument can be set up that spirituality itself is as liturgical as the liturgy is spiritual.