Liturgy and Leftovers: Resources for Reconsidering Eucharistic Reservation

This page contains links to lectures and drafts related to rethinking the origins and significance of the reservation of the Eucharist. These are for interest but not for citation (except the first, which is published and should be referenced from the book rather than my copy-edited text).

Note that I have changed and re-used titles across public presentations of these, so you need to read the description of each file to be sure it's the one you want.

1. The Fivefold Shape of the Eucharist: Abundance, Rubbish, and Ecology in Worship in Communion with Creation: Recognizing a Broader Participation; Essays in Honor of Teresa Berger (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2026), 192-219. Text here.

This is a theologically-inflected piece, with material given in a lecture at St Paul's University, Limuru, Kenya. It starts with the miraculous feeding stories (which are referenced in most of these pieces) and notes a "fifth" element alongside the well-known "fourfold shape" of taking, blessing, breaking and distributing. It relates the story of retrieving the leftovers of the meal to ancient foodways and preservation of food, and seeks some theological and liturgical implications.

2. The Tabernacle and the Streets: The Peter Powell lecture given at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, New York, in February 2026. Video accessible here.

This lecture connects modern Anglican issues and the Anglo-Catholic movement in particular with eucharistic reservation. It gives a brief summary of the historical issues addressed more fully in other pieces here, discusses some of the history of Anglican objections, and seeks to make theological connections with issues including poverty and food insecurity. A version of this material with a different title was goven at Virginia Theological Seminary in September and at Wollaston College in Perth in November.

3. "Liturgy and Leftovers*: Commixtio, the Fermentum, and Other Reuses of the Eucharist." Lecture given at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC, August 2026. Text (MS Word) here.

This lecture gives more attention to the specific liturgical practices in Roman Catholic tradition, of "commingling" (mixing a fragment of the host in the chalice) and the ancient "fermentum" (sending the host from the papal Mass to local churches) by placing them in the broader narrative of how reservation (of which I suggest these are both really forms) emerged as part of ancient foodways.

*not the same as the Wollaston lecture, which is based on the Powell Lecture! Sorry.

4. Leftovers, Care Packages, and the Eucharist: Rethinking the Origins of Eucharistic Reservation.” forthcoming in Reclining in the Kingdom of God: Essays in Honor of Nathan P. Chase, edited by Pedrag Bukovec, Thomas O’Loughlin, and Alistair C. Stewart. Brepols. Draft text here.

This is a chapter in a forthcoming book (dedicated to the late and lamented scholar Nathan Chase) which gives the fullest historical outline of my revisionist account of how eucharistic reservation began, as a form of preserving and giving the remains of meals.