Sacred Matter: Material Objects, Prophetic Performance, and Sacramental Imagination (The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology)

It is common to think of prophecy as a matter of words, and biblical literature frequently portrays and presents prophecy as precisely that.Yet biblical narrative also frequently portrays prophets interacting with the material world.Within that broader nexus of interactions, this book focuses on prophetic interactions with material objects, or things.Things feature prominently in prophetic acts of power and symbolic actions.In these acts, things are more than tools or props. They exercise agency. They mediate and reveal. A focus on the mediatory, revelatory, responsive, and transformative agency of things introduces a wider set of actors and partners and thematizes the entangled agency of prophet, God, and material world. Undergirding biblical understandings of the mediatory agency of things is a symbolic imagination that is shared between biblical prophetic literature and Christian sacramental theology.Applying the concept of performance to prophetic symbolic actions further illuminat