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How Sacrament and Ritual can become a site of resistance and ecological renewal.
Sacraments of Liberation argues that the sacraments are central to addressing the intertwined crises of poverty and ecological degradation. Grounded in the “preferential option for the poor”—a phrase popularized by the Liberation Theologists and echoed by Pope Francis—this book presents sacraments as transformative practices that move the Church from abstract theological spaces to the embodied realities of particular places where justice and restoration occur.
Responding to economic and ecological crises, this work integrates theological insights from aforementioned liberation theology, early church monk and theologian Maxim the Confessor, and the Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov with Edward Casey’s philosophical critique of modernity’s abstraction of space. It presents sacramental life as an alternative to the commodification of land, labor, and life under global capitalism. Rather than reducing the sacraments to mere symbols, it insists that their embodied practice restores community and creation.
Through theological reflection and practical application, Sacraments of Liberation demonstrates how the Church’s sacramental life reclaims sacred places of justice and care, offering hope and tangible pathways for healing humanity and the earth.
“We have grown used to a world that measures everything by what it produces, and to a church that too often measures itself the same way. This book asks a better question. Where, in a culture of speed and disposability, do we learn to be creatures again? Its answer: at the table, in the water, among the poor, on a particular piece of ground. These ideas feel familiar, but they have rarely been argued with this much theological seriousness or this much passion. What moved me most was the insistence that place is not scenery but vocation: that faithfulness means staying somewhere, with someone, long enough for grace to do its slow work. A wise and timely book.”