Reviewed by: The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage and Sin by Lauren Winner Peter Feldmeier (bio) The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage and Sin. By Lauren Winner, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2018. 230 pp. $28.00 It is virtually axiomatic that the advancement of Christian holiness, intimacy with God, and a vibrant ecclesial life require committed and disciplined spiritual [End Page 373] practices, both personally and in the shared life of the Christian community. It should also be obvious that the subjectivity of any Christian piety is necessarily fraught with potential deformations. Overly rigorous fasting, obsessive scrupulosity, and even poorly guided contemplative practices can be dangerous for the soul and the church. One needs discretion and a discerning mind to ensure what we do intentionally as Christians actually advances the Christian life rather than undermines it. But what if problematic and even dangerous perversions are intrinsically part of the Christian life, part of those very practices? This is the fundamental thesis of Lauren Winner's The Dangers of Christian Practice. Winner writes, "I will focus on deformations of Christian practices that are characteristic of the practices themselves; deformations that are somehow about the practices… I aim to consider not primarily a practice's propensity for fostering holiness (there are plenty of such accounts), but rather a practice's propensity for violence, for curvature, for being exploited for the perpetuation of damage rather than received for its redress." To advance Winner's claim that deformations are inherent in the Christian spiritual life, she uses three examples, each explored in a chapter, collectively making up the substance of her book. Her first example is the relationship between medieval Christians and Jews in Europe and the claims of Jewish host desecration, often with the miracle of the host surviving the attempted desecration. "My reading of host desecration violence suggests that the violence against Jews undertaken in the name of supposed host desecration was not incidentally Eucharistic but intrinsically Eucharistic." With great detail and solid research, Winner examines the surge of Eucharistic piety in Europe in the 13th-14th centuries coinciding with resentments concerning European Jewry. These resentments range from moneylending to Jewish rejection of the incarnation to being labeled Christ-killers. A further problematic, as she sees it, is the Jewish body of Jesus taken at the Eucharist. She asks, "How can Christians best guard against undue intimacy with Jewish bodies, while still organizing their devotional life around… intimacy with the Eucharistic/Jewish body of Jesus Christ?" The violence against Jews, she argues, "depended on the centrality of the Eucharistic symbol." Winner's next example is slave-owning mistresses in America's antebellum south. In reviewing slave-owners' diaries and examining broadly read manuals for managing a proper Christian household, we find slave mistresses determined to create a wholesome domicile that assumes the social and political givens of slavery. Here the reader discovers numerous accounts regarding "praying about slavery: asking God to give them both 'better feelings' about their slaves and slaves who are obedient." Occasional gifts, berating, and physical brutality were the three main tools slave-owning women used to manage their household slaves. Christianity itself served as such a tool. Winner shows that even mistresses who desired their slaves be devout did so primarily to promote slave docility. Slaves were catechized, for example, to pray typical daily prayers such as "O enable me to understand the greatness of my privileges, and to feel my obligations… Help me to honor my master and mistress—and to be faithful in my performance of duty to them." The central point in Winner's slave-owning example is that petitionary prayer is necessarily culturally bound and entangled in social arrangements, with all its biases and unjust conventions. [End Page 374] Winner's third and final example is Protestant baptismal practices in the U.S. circa 1900. She argues that Baptism itself necessarily holds a creative tension between strengthening family bonds and creating a new identity of discipleship that overrides biological kinship. Fundamentally, given her examples, the latter is lost to the former, so much so that Baptism was regularly understood as a family affair...