Eugene R. Schlesinger is lecturer in religious studies at Santa Clara University. He is the author of several books, including Missa Est! A Missional Liturgical Ecclesiology (2017), Sacrificing the Church: Mass, Mission, and Ecumenism (2019), and Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross (2023). He specializes in systematic theology.
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The division of the churches may be long and ugly, but Schlesinger's book is beautiful, elegant, full of grace and insight--and even short. --Eugene Rogers, professor of religious studies, University of North Carolina Greensboro Ruptured Bodies is an achievement both practical and theoretical. It is a work that theologically wrestles with the problem of ecclesial disunity in the midnight of Christian sin, particularly Christian sins in their racial, gendered, and sexual apertures. In writing that is at once urgent and informative, Schlesinger authors a compelling argument for how essential the issue of ecclesial unity remains to Christian coherence, and for how our sin threatens the integrity of our communities and our theologies. Ruptured Bodies offers a hope braced by the cross, and indeed makes the case that no other hope can meet Christians as they in fact are in history. --Anne M. Carpenter, PhD, Danforth Chair in Theological Studies, Saint Louis University This is ecumenism at its finest: a historically and theologically honest appraisal of the problem and possibilities of church division. Centering his proposal on Vatican II catholicity with an Anglican corrective, Schlesinger argues that we must neither shut our eyes to the empirical reality of a divided church, nor stop at that division and so miss the mysterious unity that rests in the love of God revealed in Christ's cross. --Anthony D. Baker, professor of systematic theology, Seminary of the Southwest