This article contends that Christ’s eucharistic offer of friendship, and the habits of attentiveness such real presence demands, must shape the church’s mission in a digital milieu that tends to shallow attention and relationships. It makes this argument in dialogue principally with the theology of Bernard Lonergan and the pontificate of Pope Francis, while aided by the cultural commentary of Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, and Marshall McLuhan. First, I consider how Lonergan’s focus on human knowing and choosing anticipates the recent turn in the Catholic magisterium under Pope Francis that considers the formative effects of digital communication technologies. Second, I show how Lonergan’s account of bias helps explain the shallowing effects of these technologies, for both cognition and community. Third, inspired by Lonergan and Pope Francis, I propose how practices of friendship—informed by Christ’s own friendship extended through Eucharistic presence—can foster habits of real presence able to counter the shallows of our digital age.

This article seeks to explore the thinking of Edward Bouverie Pusey on the doctrine of transubstantiation. It begins by looking at the conflicted way Pusey is considered and goes on to examine Pusey's writings on transubstantiation. The article points out that Pusey's early writing on transubstantiation wrongly believed that the doctrine implied a carnal view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, but that in his mature thinking this caricature was abandoned and he came to understand that transubstantiation is a form of moderate realism. Some detailed examination of Pusey's mature thinking is undertaken, including a very important set of correspondence between Edward Pusey and John Newman in 1867 which addressed the doctrine of transubstantiation. Pusey's thinking reveals that he is prepared to accept the word transubstantiation as long as it does not imply a change in the substance of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The article concludes with discussion on the term transubstantiation itself and controversially cites evidence from both Anglican and Roman Catholic sources which suggest that the dependence on a particular scholastic philosophical analysis which attempts to explain the ‘how’ of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist may be less useful than an approach of ‘what’. Pusey's mature thinking on transubstantiation is seen as useful for ecumenical dialogue between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.

This article examines the ways in which Anglican theologians have reflected on the doctrine of transubstantiation. The article notes that there is substantial agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion on the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist and that this agreement has been forged by the long established and continuing dialogue of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). At the same time the article notes that official responses from the Roman Catholic Church, while acknowledging the worth of the dialogue, have insisted on particular theological and philosophical definitions of the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist concerning a change in the substance of the elements. While Anglicans have not accepted this particular definition of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as defined by the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation, they have nonetheless accepted the notion of the real presence and reflected in modern times on transubstantiation. Examples of this reflection on transubstantiation by Anglicans are discussed in the hope of allowing the dialogue to continue at new levels of understanding.