At the end of the historical section, Katharine E. Harmon bridges the gap between the past and the present, inasmuch as she discusses what the Liturgical Movement brought about. This international and ecumenical movement promoted a deeper understanding of the liturgy as well as revisions and reforms it deemed necessary or desirable. Today, many scholars and church leaders are greatly indebted to the Liturgical Movement.

Nathan G. Jennings concludes the volume with a synthetic view on liturgical theology, the art of doing theology from and through the celebration of actual liturgies. He introduces the groundbreaking ideas of Alexander Schmemann on the matter and explains how the field has further developed, despite certain tensions with historical claims.

Kimberly Hope Belcher surveys an impressive number of authors and theories who have engaged with the broad human phenomenon of ritual. For it is evident that both classical ritual studies and more recent approaches have enormous potential for engaging in a dialogue with scholars of Christian liturgy and liturgies.

Maryann Madhavathu presents essential elements of how liturgy structures time – that is, daily, weekly, and yearly rhythms – with special attention to the meaning of Sunday and the important cycles of the liturgical year in different liturgical families. It is no surprise that Easter is of the utmost importance to all of them.

Samuel Goyvaerts explores the notion of liturgical pastoral, the roots of which are to be found in the Liturgical Movement. It is an umbrella term that makes one understand how liturgy is intrinsically connected to the Church’s diakonia, kerygma, and koinonia. Liturgy is essential for building up the Church, for faith formation, and for the faithful’s service to the world.

Harald Buchinger sketches the origins and complex evolutions of liturgies in Christian Antiquity. He focuses on patterns of worship and celebration developed in those times, underscoring how difficult it is to draw straightforward conclusions, mainly because of a paucity of sources.

Inspired by interesting research in the field of neuroscience, Dorothea Haspelmath-Finatti argues that singing in a liturgical context is not only an essential part of the act of praising and praying, but it is also healthy.

Marianne Moyaert tackles the timely issue of the encounter between Christian liturgy and the world’s religions. She puts forward the idea that there is no way back to a time before the dialogical turn. Even more so, the dialogue should not refrain from ritual and liturgical aspects. In that respect, comparative theologians are inevitable and evident partners for liturgical scholars.

During the Jim Crow era, jails were an essential tool for the enforcement of white supremacy. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the long-term goal of the civil rights movement was to destroy the Jim Crow system through a vigilant strategy of nonviolent protest that would fill the jails and shine a light on injustice. King elevated this strategy through his own arrest, incarceration, and subsequent Letter from Birmingham Jail. King’s letter offered a scathing indictment of the gradualist strategy for achieving racial justice in Alabama that had led to unsolved bombings of Black institutions, unfair treatment in the legal system, and police brutality. In response to those who criticized his presence in Birmingham for the march, he wrote that he could not “sit idly by” in Atlanta and continue to be indifferent. “Injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere.”

After a brief survey of the key christological teachings (along with the major figures) of the seven Ecumenical Councils, this chapter turns in a constructive theological vein to the influential critiques put forward by N. T. Wright, Bruce McCormack, and Sergius Bulgakov. The chapter then articulates a theological defense of the Christology of the Councils in light of exegetical and philosophical commitments.

This chapter focuses on contemporary Jewish receptions of Christology, featuring four scholars with extraordinary knowledge of christological discourse. Harry Austryn Wolfson, the philosophers Peter Ochs and Emil Fackenheim, and the New Testament professor Amy-Jill Levine all encourage Christian theologians to address difficult questions – about the unity of God, about evil, and about Jewish–Christian relations – in the specifically Christian language of Christology.

The chapter begins with an overview of Christology in the history of New Testament scholarship. It next turns to the portrayal of Jesus’s divinity and relationship to God in the Gospels and Acts. The chapter then concludes by exploring how a reframing of our understanding of divinity, especially in terms of “divine fluidity,” can provide a pathway forward to the question of Jesus’s own divinity in the Gospels and Acts, as well as the New Testament more broadly.