Fifty years ago, Yves Congar voiced concern over what he considered a serious point of confusion in the post-conciliar Church, namely, the meaning of “the sacred” in Christian faith and mission. This essay details Congar's diagnosis of the problem and explores the continued relevance of his constructive response, or, what he calls “sacred pedagogy.” For Congar, the world is not sacred in itself, because the body of Christ is the only sacred reality. Yet the world can become sacred, if we approach it “pedagogically,” as filled with signs that can lead us to grace. In the end, however, all present experience of the sacred will be transcended in the eschatological kingdom of God.

This theological roundtable discussion on shared communion, presented at the 2018 CTS Convention, reflects twenty-plus years of conversations among theologians: some Catholic, members of the College Theology Society; and some Baptist, members of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, region-at-large. They gather at the annual convention of the College Theology Society not only for intellectual exchange but also for common prayer. Over the decades, the Baptist theologians have always participated in Mass. Their fidelity informed Sandra Yocum's presidential address at the convention, which began with a lament over our Christian disunity reflected in the faces of my dear friends in Christ, these Baptist theologians who with all humility process with the other communicants, but with arms crossed over their chests to signal that they cannot receive Christ, whom they too believe to be present in the sacrament.1 The lament sparked a desire in Curtis Freeman to respond with this careful study of the rules among Baptists and Catholics for intercommunion. The subsequent thoughtful responses from Catholics and Baptists bring to the foreground the painful reality of Christ's wounded Body that neither refraining from nor participating in the Eucharist will fully resolve. Yet, each respondent affirms hope in the Eucharist's healing power and echoes Christ's own prayer “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you” (John 17:21).

This article examines some of the links between the nineteenth century Tractarian leader Edward Pusey and the Romantic poets, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in relation to eucharistic theology, especially Pusey's 1836 ‘Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament’. Pusey's sacramental theology was affected by the Romantic poets in the expression of moderate realism which also played an important part in the Oxford Movement. Like the Romantic poets, Pusey saw nature as pointing to and conveying the presence of God and this had clear connections for Pusey to a moderate realist sacramental theology where the presence of the divine was known through the material: things like bread and wine and water.