A Gift That Calls UsThe Meaning of Eucharistic Gift Exchange
Julia Smucker
The Eucharist is a gift: even more than this, it is an exchange
of gifts. This dimension of what we think is going on when the
Eucharist is celebrated permeates the language and actions of
Eucharistic prayer, in which the gathered assembly offers back to God
what it has already received from him, through which it asks for a
healing sacramental presence, by which the faithful are ultimately
redirected toward a living out of the same self-giving presence they
have received. While such language has profound implications for the
Christian life, significant questions have also been raised concerning
it. Does the very concept of “exchange” carry inescapably economic
overtones that risk undercutting the gift of grace? Can a gift truly
be called a gift when it comes with an attached obligation?
Furthermore, can any gift be fully freed from an implicit obligation,
and in light of this, is any genuine gift even possible? Such
questions pose an obvious challenge to the paradigm of Eucharistic
gift exchange. Others, however, have convincingly reclaimed the
language of gift and its importance for sacramental theology,
contending that a gift that asks something of the recipient is not
negated but rather intensified. It is this type of dynamic (not
magical, legalistic or purist) understanding of such concepts as gift
and grace, not to mention Eucharist itself, that is most helpful for
responding to the call to allow the gift of the Eucharist to bear
fruit in the lives of all who partake of it.
Undoubtedly, the thinker most strongly associated with the
deconstruction of the concept of gift has been Jacques Derrida.
Insisting on a strictly purist definition of gift, in which “there
must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt,”1
Derrida argues that no gift can in fact be absent of these things, and
thus a true gift “in which no one acquires credit and no one contracts
a debt” appears impossible.2 For Derrida, any reward to the giver,
even the mere acknowledgement of the gift, constitutes a
“contamination” and thus cancels out the gift. This is so even in the
case of an anonymous gift known only to the giver, who is rewarded by
the knowledge of having given.3 In a conversation with Jean-Luc Marion
1 Jacques Derrida, Given Time, quoted in John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 163. Caputo helpfully summarizes Derrida’s argument both here and in his later essay, “Apostles of the Impossible: on God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, 185-222 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). 2 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 163.3 John Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic,” Modern Theology 11:1 (January 1995): 119-56. Ref. from p. 130.
later in their careers, Derrida clarifies that while he believes the
word “gift” to be self-contradictory,4 he “never concluded that there
is no gift,” only that it cannot be known as such: “as soon as you
know it, you destroy it.”5 A true phenomenologist, Derrida is
concerned with appearances, hence his claim that the gift must appear
as impossible. It follows from this that whether or not a gift can
actually exist at some deeper level is a question that extends beyond
the realm of human knowledge and experience.
Derrida’s philosophy had a considerable influence on Marion, who
attempted to reclaim the concept of gift for its theological
implications while accepting Derrida’s seemingly impossible standards
by which a gift can be defined. Marion agrees with Derrida that a
gift cannot be explained or accessed “within the horizon of economy,”
but he diverges from Derrida in his assertion that a “fully achieved”
gift can still be described by means of reduction. Using the biblical
example of eschatological parables, Marion argues that a gift is
possible when the recipient is unknown, as is the case with those in
the parables who have given to the poor without realizing, until the
eschaton, that they have given to Christ. He further notes, in a
reduction of the gift itself, that what is given is not always a
4 Richard Kearney, moderator, “On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion,” in Caputo and Scanlon, 54-78. Ref. from p. 67.5 Ibid, 59-60.
tangible object, and that in such cases the gift is often more
meaningful: “When we give ourselves, our life, our time, when we give
our word, not only do we give no thing, but we give much more.” This
observation becomes his means of escape from “the horizon of economy,”
which both he and Derrida consider a necessary endeavor even while
disagreeing on its possibility.6
In view of this shared concern, John Caputo raises the question
of the appropriateness of debt in relation to a gift, both in direct
response to the preceding conversation7 and again in his own follow-up
essay. In the latter, he points to this question as the greatest
disagreement between Derrida and Marion: for Derrida, any sense of
debt, duty or obligation automatically negates the gift,8 whereas in
Marion’s hypothetical experimentation with reduction, obligation turns
out to play a vital role. In the donor’s experience, the recognition
that something is givable arises out of obligation, “which breaks the
spell of autrarchy – ‘I do not owe anyone anything’ – and I own up to
the debt I owe the other.” In the recipient’s experience, “a debt of
gratitude” is accepted by the receipt of the gift.9
As Caputo goes on to summarize, Marion demonstrates how the
reduction of one or more dimensions of a gift can in a sense raise its6 Ibid, 62-64.7 Ibid, 77.8 Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible,” 212-15.9 Ibid, 201.
stakes. A gift without a recipient can be achieved “when I love my
enemy who rejects my love” (and who consequently “does himself a
disservice” by rendering the gift more “pure”), and a gift without a
gift may consist of “visible love without a visible token” and thus
remain unquantifiable. In the most problematic reduction, a gift
without a donor (that is, when the donor is unknown to the recipient)
creates an unpayable debt leading to irremediable guilt.10 Thus, in a
rather valiant attempt to get around Derrida’s deconstruction, Marion
has navigated himself into a somewhat awkward position.
Indeed, the entire exchange between the two gives rise to a
degree of awkwardness, as is displayed at the end of the dialogue
mentioned above in a telling remark injected by moderator Richard
Kearney. Thanking Derrida and Marion “for giving us their thoughts,”
Kearney comments, “One of the nice things about the gift is that it
gives you the opportunity to express gratitude for the gift, even if
you betray the gift in doing so.” To this Derrida generously
responds, “No one knows who is thanking whom for what,”11 essentially
acknowledging Kearney’s thanks in the only way possible in light of
the preceding conversation: by describing it as unknown.
10 Ibid, 202.11 Kearney, 77.
What is revealing in this brief exchange is a tenacious impulse
that remains in the face of all theoretical deconstruction: as John
Milbank describes a piece of the Derridean paradox, “though a gift
cannot be, we cannot elide the human desire to give.”12 This is perhaps
the dilemma that leads Marion, in Milbank’s assessment, to being
caught somewhere between Derrida’s nihilism and the notion of
“purified gift-exchange” that Milbank proposes as a more helpful
understanding of Christian agape.13 Milbank explicitly differentiates
his term from the concept of “pure gift,” believing that “modern
purism about the gift, which renders it unilateral,” is partially
based on a misguided identification of agape with disinterest.
Contesting Derrida’s Kantian requirement of absolute purity of motive
as a precondition of a gift, Milbank counters that
if a gift is first and foremost a suitable gift … then the act of giving is notnecessarily ruined by imperfect intention. Moreover, one can enjoy giving, not onlyin the mode of self-congratulation, but also as a kind of ecstasis, or continuationof oneself out of oneself. Likewise, the wanting and even the demanding to receiveback (in some fashion) may be a recognition of ineradicable connection withothers and a desire for its furtherance.14
It is this “connection with others” that is crucial here, as
Milbank reintroduces to the discussion the natural context in which
any gift takes place, which is a fundamentally relational one. From a
theological angle, Milbank speculates, our existence is itself a gift;
12 Milbank, 130.13 Ibid, 131-33.14 Ibid, 132.
anthropologically, our social experience tells us that “human
generosity belongs within the context of prior attachments, or at the
very least the making of such attachments.”15 By highlighting the
absurdity of purely unilateral gift-giving in both romantic and
familial relationships, which would cause the relationships to be
legitimately judged unhealthy, Milbank’s insight on reciprocity
appears less counterintuitive and more common-sense: “Giving here is
most free where it is yet most bound, most mutual and most reciprocally
demanded.”16
Marion’s chief oversight, according to Milbank, is that he “fails
to see that reciprocity is as much a condition for the gift as gift is
for reciprocity.” This appears to be the consequence of allowing the
concept of gift to be extracted from its relational context and set up
in a purely ontological one, as if occurring in some hyper-theoretical
Platonic otherworld. In response to Marion’s intrinsically confused
attempt to free the gift from ontology into an even more remote
abstraction, Milbank insists that “gift without being” is a nonentity,
but an actual gift necessarily entails a relationship.17
The theological implications of this are manifold: in addition to
the Trinitarian dimension of the divine act of self-giving, Milbank
15 Ibid, 124.16 Ibid.17 Ibid, 137.
points to Old and New Testament examples of the biblical witness to
the “primary relationality” necessary for the offering and reception
of a gift. In the biblical narrative, the reciprocally-giving
relationship begins and ends with covenant, expanding from the
intermittent debt cancellation of Jubilee into the normative
generosity of the redeemed community, in which agape love becomes the
new and only debt.18 The perpetual gift-exchange of agape is not simply
a new rule to be legalistically obeyed, nor is it “spontaneously and
freely to love, of one’s own originality and without necessarily
seeking any communion.” Rather, it is an “answering repetition” that
is intrinsically and inextricably relational.19
The occurrence of gift-giving as exchange within a social
framework is of course not only biblical but broadly universal, albeit
governed by varied and particular cultural norms.20 Milbank suggests
that the point at which any such norms fall short of Christian agape is
in their “agonistic components,” by the “purging” of which he arrives
at his defense of exchange as transformed by Christian theology and
practice. He calls this transformed agape reality “purified gift-
exchange,” defined over against the Derridean (de)construct of the
“pure gift.”21 In the same vein, Louis-Marie Chauvet’s development of 18 Ibid, 145-49.19 Ibid, 150.20 Ibid, 126-28.21 Ibid, 131.
the theology of “symbolic exchange” provides a helpful connection
between the relational and sacramental dimensions of the Christian
life. Like Marion, Chauvet seeks to liberate sacramental theology
from any possible monetization, yet he does so without constraining
himself to accept the imposition of an absolute and unattainable
purity as requisite for there to be a gift.
In contrast with market exchange, which measures all transactions
according to quantifiable value systems, Chauvet presents a contrarian
logic of symbolic exchange in which “subjects exchange themselves,”22
without keeping count of what is in the end unquantifiable. According
to Chauvet’s model, some sense of obligation to reciprocate a gift is
not only allowable but necessary. While allowing for the universal
urge toward some degree of disobligation offered along with a gift,
Chauvet nonetheless insists that “obligation belongs to ethical
relation” and cannot, indeed should not, be completely taken away:
“Too much generosity alienates. To overwhelm someone with gifts so
gratuitous that one takes away from the other even the possibility of
giving in return is to treat that person as an object because, by
denying her or him the possibility of being a subject of duty, one
deprives her or him from the dignity of subject, period.”23 The giving
22 Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, trans. Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 119.23 Ibid, 125.
of gifts between active subjects therefore necessitates, rather than
being negated by, an obligation toward some form of reciprocity.
Ironically, it is this very obligation that frees the gift from a
market-exchange paradigm by allowing it to be received as a gift
rather than acquired as a mere “value-object.”24
Drawing out the profound ramifications of symbolic exchange for
sacramental theology, Chauvet concludes that “the reception of God’s
grace as grace … requires … the return-gift of faith, love, conversion of
heart, witness by one’s life.”25 Such a turn of life seems to Chauvet
to require a turn of language in order to get at the meaning of this
exchange, particularly with regards to the traditional language of
sacrifice. Rather than having to choose between “sacrifice” and “non-
sacrifice,” Chauvet proposes the term “anti-sacrifice,” which he
hastens to clarify is not the denial of sacrifice but is essentially a
conception of sacrifice turned on its head, “back toward ethical
practice, the place where the ritual practice is verified.”26 Chauvet
explicitly sees this language of “anti-sacrifice” within the
perspective of a multivalent Eucharistic theology, as one dimension
among many of the Eucharistic rite and of the Christ-event, yet as a
24 Ibid, 122.25 Ibid, 124.26 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995), 307.
nonetheless helpful connection between Christology and the ritual that
points toward it – toward the uniqueness of Christ’s radically kenotic
sacrifice.27 This Eucharistic and kenotic “anti-sacrifice,” in sum, is
a call to conversion and reconciliation:
One sees what is at stake in what we call the anti-sacrificial: not the negation of thesacrificial or of a part of it (its dimension of reconciliation), but the task to convert all thesacrificial to the gospel in order to live it, not in a servile, but in a filial (and hence in a brotherly and sisterly) manner.This is precisely why the realization of this intimate association, based on our commonfiliation, by the ethical practice of reconciliation between human beings, constitutes thepremier place of our “sacrifice.” That is what the anti-sacrifice of the Eucharist shows us andenjoins us to do.28
With Christ’s self-offering, made manifest in the Eucharist,
being understood as a calling in this sense, Chauvet’s examination of
the Eucharistic Prayer as being quintessentially representative of the
“symbolic exchange between humanity and God”29 carries strong
relational and ethical implications. On one level, the exchange that
occurs in the Eucharistic Prayer is that of a discourse, yet one whose
content signifies a still deeper exchange of offerings. In the
institution narrative, not only are Christ’s actions recalled, but
they become commands, and not only for the ritual but also beyond it.
Similarly, the anamnesis discourse is not only about memory but is
primarily a reception of Christ’s gift of himself, a reception so
closely tied to the church’s own offering that it becomes a
prefiguration of the return-gift, which is “the existential offering of
27 Ibid, 301-302.28 Ibid, 311, italics his.29 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 129.
one’s own life.” The most direct offering and request are made in the
epiclesis discourse, which Chauvet again takes beyond the rite itself:
“becoming the body of Christ” applies most immediately to the
transformation of the Eucharistic elements, but ultimately to “the
supreme goal of the Eucharist” which is “the gift of charity between
sisters and brothers in unity.” This dual transformation means that
receiving Christ’s presence in the Eucharist entails being Christ’s
presence in the world: “Mass would be barren if it did not enjoin on
Christians the obligation of ‘becoming what they receive.’”30 In all
of these ways, the entire dynamic exchange of the Eucharistic Prayer
maps out what Chauvet calls an “itinerary of conversion” which is
necessary in order to live the Christian life in thanksgiving to God.31
Chauvet’s analysis of the Eucharistic Prayer thus points to a
divine-human exchange that contains a set of reciprocal and very much
interdependent obligations: just as “the realization by human beings
of the performance of thanksgiving demands that God give them the
competence,”32 the needed means of competence is given for a specific
purpose. “The reception of grace as grace (and not as something else
which would be more or less magical) never goes without a task; it
implies the ethical return-gift of justice and mercy.”33 The return-30 Ibid, 133-138.31 Ibid, 133.32 Ibid. Italics his.33 Ibid, 138.
gift is necessary, not as a prerequisite to the reception of grace
(otherwise it would not be grace but legalism), but as a fulfillment, in
order for the gift to realize its purpose, rather than be reduced to
merely minimal validity (otherwise it would not be grace but
superstition). Reception of the sacramental presence of Christ is
meant to flow into “this return-gift of the living-in-grace with one’s
sisters and brothers,” without which “eucharistic communion, though
‘valid,’ would be fruitless” and “a misapprehension of God’s gift.”34
In order to take the reception of Christ’s self-gift in the
Eucharist beyond mere validity, the practice to which we are called,
in Milbank’s terminology, is “perpetual Eucharist”: not grudging or
legalistic acts of charity, but “a living through the offering … of
the gift given to us of God himself in the flesh.” To underscore how
vitally important this living-out of perpetual Eucharist is, Milbank
adds that to deny the possibility of such “non-identical repetition”
(what Chauvet would call the “return-gift”) is tantamount to denying
the continued manifestation of the incarnation through Eucharistic
presence.35 Contrary to Derrida’s purism, Milbank insists with Chauvet
that the gift is dependent not on the lack of reciprocity but rather
on the presence of it: “Only … if first we really do receive, and
34 Ibid, 145.35 Milbank, 152.
receive through our participatory giving in turn, is it conceivable
that there is a gift to us, or that we ourselves can give.”36
The language of gift exchange, as liturgical theologian Kevin
Irwin points out, is in fact deeply embedded in the Eucharistic
prayers of the Roman rite, most obviously in the use of the Latin word
commercium, meaning “exchange,” in the prayers over the gifts.37 This
term is of course not to be confused with its English cognate
“commercial,” which would carry the inherent danger of a badly
misguided interpretation of the Eucharistic exchange that would reduce
the gift of sacramental presence to a quantifiable commodity to be
bought and sold. It is well known that this type of corruption of the
gift into monetized recompense was prevalent during the Middle Ages,38
with long-lasting ramifications. Edward Kilmartin, in his essay “The
Sacrifice of Thanksgiving and Social Justice,” summarizes the history
of this tragic misinterpretation and subsequently offers a helpful
alternative for understanding the place of monetary offerings in
Eucharistic celebrations.39 A better interpretation of the collection,
36 Ibid, 154.37 Kevin W. Irwin, Models of the Eucharist (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 58-60.38 While the medieval period is most infamous in this regard, the temptation toward a commercialized pneumatology is as old as the New Testament itself, asis apparent from the story of Simon of Samaria, who misguidedly attempts to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles, in Acts 8:4-25 (see esp. v. 18-20).39 Edward Kilmartin, S.J., “The Sacrifice of Thanksgiving and Social Justice,”in Liturgy and Social Justice, ed. Mark Searle (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1980), 53-71. For his overview of the history of the Mass stipend, see
Kilmartin proposes, necessarily implies a greater level of
participation by the faithful both in and beyond the Mass, as they
express their thanksgiving to God and commit themselves to the service
of humanity.40
Without disregarding the danger of monetization, Nathan Mitchell
responds to Marion’s well-intentioned attempt to escape “the tyranny
of economics” by noting the parallel danger of viewing money and
material goods as “simply filthy lucre” that remains outside the
possibility of divine transformation. If, on the contrary, we believe
that God is transforming all our offerings “into the currency of an
utterly new exchange, one radically different from the ordinary money-
based commerce that exists among human beings,” it then follows that
“the theology of eucharist cannot separate cult from care.”41 Here,
again, is where Chauvet’s language of symbolic exchange and Milbank’s
resituation of the gift in its relational context can forge a helpful
path between a legalistic or market-based approach to sacramental
grace on the one hand, and a quasi-Gnostic separation of the material
from the spiritual on the other. When recognized as a gift (which by
definition implies relationship) rather than a commodity (purchased,
according to a quantifiable value, as an object with no relational
especially p. 57-68.40 Ibid, 68-71.41 Nathan Mitchell, Real Presence: The Work of the Eucharist (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2001), 112-113.
end), the Eucharist frees us to participate “in the reciprocal
relation of give-and-take … that is in turn, in the Holy Spirit, the
gift of relation.”42
The essentially relational nature of the gift is thus profoundly
liberating. At the same time, it is also profoundly paradoxical. The
common drive to free a gift from its implied obligation to
reciprocate, however futile the attempt may be, might in one sense
appear to point toward Derrida’s nihilistic conclusions regarding the
possibility of the gift.43 On the other hand, the very futility of
such an attempt would also seem to indicate a social instinct toward
reciprocity44 that may perhaps be even more deeply underlying. What is
therefore apparent from the struggles that manifest themselves in
numerous interpersonal exchanges is a very live tension between two
widespread and deep-seated intuitions: firstly, that relationships are
not quantifiable (hence the desire to free the recipient of a gift
from anything that smacks of a commercial exchange), and secondly, that
relationships imply, even demand, reciprocity (hence the
inescapability of the perceived obligation to respond, at the very
least by acknowledging the gift). Moreover, human experience tells us42 Milbank, 154.43 Technically speaking, Derrida, as previously noted, is nihilistic regardingthe possibility of the appearance of the gift, but this phenomenological quibble is incidental to the discussion at hand.44 As cultural anthropology shows and as Milbank has pointed out, this social instinct is nearly universal, if not completely so (see Milbank, 126-128).
that this sense of reciprocity has a definite social purpose: to enter
into the reciprocal exchange by responding to a gift received is an
inherently relationship-building act.
If, then, the Eucharist is a gift, what is its ultimate purpose
within the relationship between God and humanity? Simply put, what
does the Eucharist ask of those who receive it? Milbank’s answer to
this is simple and, of course, broadly relational: “This is the one
given condition of the gift, that we love because God first loved us,”
pithily adding, “It being given that God is love.”45 Further fleshing
out what it means to love, particularly in response to Christ’s
“active presence” in the Eucharist, Irwin notes a vital implication of
the “dynamism and action” of this presence: that Eucharistic devotion
“is never to be regarded as something that is passive or that does not
require a response from us. If in fact Christ is active among us
through the Eucharist, then one of the required responses is that we
be engaged in acting on this gift by the way we are present to others
in the community with which we celebrate the Eucharist.”46
Chauvet draws similar connections in his framework of symbolic
exchange: Christ who offers himself in the sacrament calls us to become
45 Milbank, 154.46 Irwin, 325. He also makes clear that a dynamic view of the “required response” to Eucharistic presence does not allow for Pelagianism, since our response begins and ends with God and is continuously dependent on his initiation and sustenance.
what we receive, which is the self-giving presence of Christ to the
world. Thus the “ethical return-gift” implied by reception of the
Eucharist is also a necessary implication of the transformation that
happens in and through it.47 If it is truly the case that Eucharistic
transformation extends to all areas of human life, this fundamentally
incarnational sacrament must surely both call and enable us to live
the reconciling Gospel demonstrated by the incarnate Word. This is
why Chauvet can call love for God and neighbor “the ‘true sacrifice,’”
including “its socio-political implications.”48
Conversely, Kilmartin equates the failure to recognize the claim
that Eucharistic celebration makes to consecrated lives, manifested in
“a real commitment to love all humankind as brothers and sisters of
the same Father,” with a betrayal of the “holy sacrifice.”49 More
positively, he draws on Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church (Lumen Gentium) for an understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice
that is more faithful to the Church’s mission, in which “[the
faithful] offer the divine victim to God and themselves along with
it.”50 When sacrifice and offering are understood in this holistic
manner, Kilmartin ultimately sees a positive place for monetary
offerings in a Eucharistic context, particularly when designated for 47 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 136-138.48 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 315.49 Kilmartin, 55.50 Lumen Gentium 11, cited in Kilmartin, 56.
the poor, in that they strengthen the connection between liturgy and
social justice, and thereby “provide the theological basis for the
laity to meet their social obligations in the liturgy and so bring a
new commitment to social action in their daily lives.”51
If this is the commitment to which the Eucharist calls us, are we
then to conclude that the gift it offers us is somehow diluted or even
annihilated by such a calling? This might well be the case if the
context of the offering (in either direction) were impersonal. If,
however, the offering is ultimately and fundamentally relational, with
all the demands implied by any relationship on those who enter into
it, then the calling is itself a gift. Without it, as Chauvet has
pointed out, we would be alienated by the sheer gratuity of a gift so
“pure” as to deprive us of any possibility of responding to it.52 In
this sense, we may even see the entire divine-human exchange, which
could only be made possible by God’s deliberate condescension to enter
it, as the very gift that graciously allows us to offer ourselves in
return. This divine condescension into relational reciprocity is the
ultimate act of self-emptying kenosis, which is at the heart of the
incarnation. And incarnation, in turn, is at the heart of what
happens in the Eucharist. The best gifts, then, are indeed the ones
51 Kilmartin, 70.52 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 125.
that ask the most of us, never doing so without giving us what we need
to fulfill their purpose. What we receive in the Eucharist is a gift
that calls us to give of ourselves, being simultaneously a
transformative presence that enables us to respond to such a call,
sending us forth, as we sometimes hear in the final dismissal of the
Mass, “to love and serve the Lord and one another.”
Thanks be to God.
Works Cited
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____________ and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Chauvet, Louis-Marie. The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, translated by Madeleine Beaumont. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2001.
___________. Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995.
Irwin, Kevin W. Models of the Eucharist. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005.
Kilmartin, Edward J. “The Sacrifice of Thanksgiving and Social Justice.” In Liturgy and Social Justice, edited by Mark Searle, 53-71. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1980.
Milbank, John. “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic.” Modern Theology 11:1 (January 1995): 119-56.
Mitchell, Nathan. Real Presence: The Work of Eucharist. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2000.