Usually, the blurbs exaggerate, but not in this case. Most of the endorsers’ words would fit nicely into a review of this collection of Fritz Bauerschmidt’s essays. Each of the essays is worth reading and—a bonus for the awkward and easily-distracted reader—they need not be read in order. These are essays that can be read hunched over a library table, pencil in hand, or enjoyed in a comfortable chair with a glass of wine.

Bauerschmidt gives an excellent précis of each of the essays (save for essays seven and eight, which share a paragraph); so, the reviewer is spared that task. The essays span 25 years and treat a wide range of subjects, from the medieval to the modern, from doctrine to fiction; Bauerschmidt describes them as ‘attempts…to think through how theology relates to politics and culture’ (p. ix). His interlocutors include the usual suspects—such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Julian of Norwich. But he also brings less familiar voices into the conversation; for example, he draws on the work of Chantal Delsol in ‘Christendom and the Marian Path of the Church’ (Chapter 5) and brings Alice Walker’s analysis to the discussion in ‘Startling Figures and Wingless Chickens: Flannery O’Connor’s Postmodern Apologetic’ (Chapter 12). Stanley Hauerwas is conspicuously absent from the index (though one title shows up in the bibliography), given that a consistent undercurrent in the essays is that the church’s main task in the world is to be the church. Yet that is precisely the way that Hauerwas shows up, not as an interlocutor but as a slight tint to the lens through which Bauerschmidt examines his subjects; and it is clearer in the earlier essays, like ‘Walking in the Pilgrim City’ (Chapter 10).

Instead of attempting a summary, which would certainly not do justice to the scope of the essays, I will restrict myself to examining the themes that run throughout the collection and engaging two of the essays in more detail.

Bauerschmidt’s ‘Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic’ (Chapter 1), hints at the themes that run throughout the volume. He describes the five theses set out in the chapter as ‘related to theological anthropology’. The scope of that theological anthropology is quite broad, telling us not just what it means to be a human creature, but how we ought to think about who we are as Christians, how we ought to conceive of the relationship between nature and grace, how to think about human nature in relation to reason and natural law, and how to understand history in a Christian way. Three of these theses—about nature and grace, reason and natural law, and the Christian understanding of history—play out in the essays that consider various facets of Catholic tradition, particularly the Catholic intellectual tradition. The two theses pertaining to Christian identity—a way of life patterned on the practice of Jesus and the saints and a commitment to thinking and living ‘as the pilgrim people of God’ (p. 17)—are reflected in the essays that consider how Christians are to bear the image of God and live as the body of Christ in uncertain times.

The five theses also suggest the overarching theme of the essays, which is, as Bauerschmidt puts it, ‘the passing of Christendom’ (p. 151). How are Christians to be the body of Christ and bear witness in the contemporary world? This is the central question around which the essays orbit, and the way Bauerschmidt addresses them continues in an evangelical spirit. Just beneath the surface of many of these wide-ranging and delightful essays is a gentle but firm insistence that a focus on Christ ought to be the church’s (and individual Christians’) strategy for coping with and remaining faithful in this era of transition from modernity to an as-yet-unknown world. For example, all six of the suggestions at the end of Chapter 6 (‘Order, Freedom, and “Kindness”: Julian of Norwich on the Edge of Modernity’) might be summed up as answering the question, ‘How should a Christian live at the end of modernity?’, by recourse to a text from Hebrews 12: by ‘fixing our eyes on Jesus’. The rest of Hebrews 12 would fill in many of the details in Bauerschmidt’s various suggestions. Embodying Christ’s compassion—the sixth suggestion—requires almost precisely this kind of attention: ‘Christians today, as always, must hold fast to the appearing of divine love in the flesh of Jesus Christ’ (p. 152).

The other theme that runs through the volume, woven into Bauerschmidt’s thoughtful commentary on how Christians ought to live as the body of Christ in an increasingly unfamiliar and insecure world, is that of pilgrimage. He introduces the concept in the first chapter (on p. 17, as quoted above) and it crops up in many of the essays—for instance, at the conclusion to ‘The Trinity and Politics’ (Chapter 4), where he characterises Catholics as ‘the Church Militant on pilgrimage to the kingdom’ (p. 97). It comes to the fore in ‘Walking in the Pilgrim City’. Bauerschmidt critically engages Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1988 – de rigeur for PhD students at Duke in the 1990s). Christians at the edge of modernity, he argues, ought to recognise, as our late ancient theological forebears did, that ‘the city is not so much a collection of buildings as it is an ideological project…a complex matrix of signification that forms the world of its inhabitants’ (p. 243). Early Christian practices re-signified many of the elements of civic piety, worshipping a different deity, marrying and bearing children in a different way and for different reasons, reasons rooted in the character of the logos and oriented to an eschatological telos rather than to the good of the city for its own sake. In the secular city, ancient or (post-)modern, the church cannot be at home. Now, as then, we ought to conceive of neither the city nor the church primarily as a place. At the conclusion of the essay, the themes of attention to Christ and pilgrimage meet. In the church’s homelessness she is united with the God-made-flesh who had no place to lay his head. And the presence of the Lord ‘transforms exile into pilgrimage’ (p. 252).

These essays are thoughtful, lyrical and compelling. Bauerschmidt has a way with words and ideas that is at once imaginative and theologically rigorous. The publication of the collection is timely and deserves the attention of anyone trying to figure out how to live Christianly in these precarious and confusing times.