God’s Gift Giving

Hans Urs von Balthasar once said that theology should be done on one’s knees, suggesting that the attitude it should create in the reader or hearer is one of adoration and praise for the divine mystery. Few contemporary theologians achieve this effect, but here Kevin Seasoltz comes close. This book is a profound but simply written mediation on the central mysteries of the Christian faith-the trinity, redemption, the eucharist, human participation in the divine life and solidarity with one another--in a contemporary idiom. It begins with the notion of gift giving, which ever since Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don has been the subject of intense discussion among ethicists, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as among philosophers like Jacques Derrida and theologians like Jean-Luc Marion. Seasoltz takes up these contemporary notions of gift giving and teases out various facets of the divine gifts of word and sacrament, of the Spirit, of communion and community. As Seasoltz says in one summary sentence: ＂The mystery of the Trinity is made accessible to us above all in the eucharist, for it is there in a special and ongoing way that we are drawn into the very life of God and into the lives of each other.＂

R. Kevin Seasoltz, OSB, is perhaps the leading Roman Catholic liturgical scholar in the English-speaking world. Editor of Worship for 18 years, professor of liturgy at the Catholic University of America for 25 years, and now professor of liturgy at St. Johns’s University, Collegeville, he is the author of 4 books and over 200 academic articles and has lectured extensively throughout the English-speaking world. His ＂Sense of the Sacred: Theological Foundations of Christian Architecture and Art＂ won first place in the category of liturgy for the Catholic Press Associations’s 2006 Awards