This is the second of three related books in which David Brown attempts to retrieve some of the wealth of cultural and artistic experiences for a fruitful discussion of their potential for renewing Christian life and its theological and liturgical expressions. In this volume Brown examines various dimensions, forms, appearances and extensions of the human body in order to locate known, unknown, marginalised, repressed and forgotten occasions of God's presence. Moreover, he highlights possible religious dimensions of a number of musical genres (from Bach to pop) and offers general comments on the need for Christians to widen their horizon of the sacramentality of life. Brown argues for a full retrieval of the belief that God was active in every aspect of his creation and therefore can be found in every aspect of human experience: ‘all the world should be seen as sacramental, as imbued through and through with divine presence’ (p. 4). Theology must take this wealth of human experience seriously, engage with it and facilitate the disclosure of divine presence and grace in and beyond traditional forms of ecclesial imagination.

Brown takes the reader on an impressive and often detailed journey through classical and contemporary religious and cultural manifestations of the sacred and the divine. This wide net tries to capture as many occasions of the divine as possible: in beautiful, sexual and ugly manifestations of the human body, in the different forms of dance, but also in human food and drink. He pays attention to contemporary individualistic reductions of the social potential of meals, and he comments on the complexity of water symbolism in Christian baptism. His overall concern remains the question of how food and drink might be able to generate conditions which make openness to experience of the divine more feasible.

Throughout this volume Brown invites his readers to transcend the limits of a mere mental response to works of artistic imagination and cultural expression in the direction of a more comprehensive and transformative affection of their entire bodily existence. He resists attempts ‘to impose over-simplistic or narrowly specific criteria for what may or may not communicate the divine’ (p. 220). This wish to widen the impact of human imagination and expression on the discussion of religious experience points both to the attraction and to the problematic nature of Brown's enterprise. On the one hand he bemoans the contemporary individualism of experience which has neglected much of the social engagement of Christian tradition. On the other hand he does not engage with the intellectual processes through which the church – rightly or wrongly – has tried to develop criteria for articulating the content and forms of divine revelation, presence and grace in this universe. Brown pays no attention to the theological struggle with such criteria in thinkers, as for instance, Lessing, Schleiermacher, Otto, Eliade, Tillich, Ricœur and Tracy. These thinkers share Brown's conviction of the necessity of some sort of correlation between an interpretation of wider human experience, on the one hand, and a dynamic interpretation of Christian faith in the context of the larger religious landscape, on the other hand. But, unlike Brown, these thinkers have attempted to reflect on the nature of such an approach and on its hermeneutical conditions and limitations. Moreover, they have demonstrated that such critical and engaged thinking need not end up with exclusive lists of criteria; rather it may advance the dynamic and critical attention to possible instances of revelation, however within a properly discussed framework of religious praxis.

Brown's hermeneutics of retrieval offer the reader an enormous wealth of information of how experiences might be able to illustrate divine grace and presence. For an in-depth discussion of how to assess this kaleidoscope of potential presence within a hermeneutics of both retrieval and suspicion, the critical reader would need to turn elsewhere.