The Broken Body

"Fusing biblical and patristic theology, analytic philosophy, and spiritual tradition, Sarah Coakley has produced a fascinating, inspiring, and compelling account of Christ's identity, and its importance for questions of life."
--PROFESSOR MARK WYNN, University of Oxford

"Coakley argues that good Christology arises only from intellectual and spiritual postures learnt by encountering Christ openly. This volume subtly and powerfully facilitates such encounter, with God and, in him, with our neighbours, especially the Jewish people."
--PROFESSOR JUDITH WOLFE, University of St. Andrews

"Everything we have come to expect from Sarah Coakley is here in this extraordinary volume of wonderful clarity: Christology is here shown to embrace abjection and jouissance, to advocate sacrifice that is itself the end of patriarchal violence. This is sacrifice, re-made."
--PROFESSOR KATHERINE SONDEREGGER, Virginia Theological Seminary

How should Christians think about the person of Jesus Christ today? In this volume, Sarah Coakley argues that this question has to be 'broken open' in new and unexpected ways: by an awareness of the deep spiritual demands of the christological task and its strikingly 'apophatic' dimensions; by a probing of the paradoxical ways in which Judaism and Christianity are drawn together in Christ, even by those issues which seem to 'break' them most decisively apart; and by an exploration of the mode of Christ's presence in the eucharist, with its intensification, 'breaking' and re-gathering of human desires. In this sequel to her celebrated earlier volume of essays, Powers and Submissions, Coakley returns to its unifying theme of divine power and contemplative submission, and weaves a new web of christological outcomes which remain replete with controversial implications for gender, spirituality and ethics.