Words Made Flesh draws together a number of Elaine Graham’s shorter writings and essays and thereby maps out the work of a pioneer theological thinker and the development of pastoral and practical theology in the last twenty years.

Elaine Graham considers the theological significance of topics as diverse as nativity plays, science fiction, gender, consumerism, cyberspace and urban regeneration.

They all share a concern with the way the sources and norms of the Christian tradition can enter into a creative and critical conversation with contemporary experience in order to generate the ‘practical wisdom’ by which the life of the Church can be directed.

They reflect Elaine Graham’s fundamental conviction that theology as ‘talk about God-in-the-world’ is always practical and public – and that it begins and ends in the complexities of the human condition: where words become flesh.

Professor Elaine Graham is Samuel Fergusson Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology at the University of Manchester and Executive Director of the Manchester Research Institute for Religion and Civil Society. She was President of the International Academy of Practical Theology between 2005 and 2007.