Sacraments of Liberation

Henry Walter Spaulding is editorial manager for the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. He also serves as an adjunct professor of Christian ethics at Ashland University, Ashland Theological Seminary, George Fox University, and Indiana Wesleyan University. He got his M.Div. from Duke Divinity School and his D.Phil. from Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books including Iconoclastic Sex: Christian Sexual Ethics and Human Trafficking and the forthcoming Between Two Gileads. He has published several articles in journals such as the Wesleyan Theological Journal, Review and Expositor, and Literary Imagination. He is also pastor at Hope United Methodist Church. Spaulding lives in Columbus, Ohio.

“We have grown used to a world that measures everything by what it produces, and to a church that too often measures itself the same way. This book asks a better question. Where, in a culture of speed and disposability, do we learn to be creatures again? Its answer: at the table, in the water, among the poor, on a particular piece of ground. These ideas feel familiar, but they have rarely been argued with this much theological seriousness or this much passion. What moved me most was the insistence that place is not scenery but vocation: that faithfulness means staying somewhere, with someone, long enough for grace to do its slow work. A wise and timely book.”