Linda Gibler has written an inventive and wonderful exploration of the elements of baptism: water, oil, and fire. There are wonderful discoveries to be gained each step of the way. I am eager to use this book in classes. Gibler's insights will enrich preaching as well as the celebration of the sacraments. The book would also be useful in Sunday School classes and will be of special interest to those exploring the relationship of science and faith.Paul Galbreath, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology For those who preach and teach about baptism, Gibler's book is a rich source of materials, scientific and sacred, for opening awareness, inspiring gratitude and awe, and deepening faith.Worship Poetic, cosmological, theological, and liturgical sensibilities (and highly informed ones, at that) collude in From the Beginning to Baptism: Scientific and Sacred Stories of Water, Oil, and Fire. Linda Gibler's extensive meditations on the physical elements of water, oil, and fire sacramentalized in Catholic baptismal have a 13.7 billion year stretch-reach. There's a lot of learning at work here. It's just hugely engaging reading, and competent liturgical theology deserves as much!Bernard J. Lee, SM Professor of theology St. Mary's University San Antonio, Texas Gibler provides a cutting-edge understanding of sacramentality in which theology and science are fully integrated. Smoothly written and powerfully engaging, the book deftly covers new ground while synthesizing traditional sources, previous studies and the latest scientific findings. The magnificent Teilhardian vision of a cosmocentric sacramentality that emerges is simply stunning.Allan Figueroa Deck, SJ Executive Director USCCB Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church Gibler provides us with a rare integration of cosmology and sacramentality. Grounded in a theology of creation, the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, as well as the science behind the new universe story, she approaches her study of the Sacrament of Baptism through biblical, patristic, and cosmic insights into water, oil, and fire. The sacrament comes alive in both its human and cosmic dimensions. Her work reflects ways in which science, theology, and spirituality can all complement each other. It is truly a cosmocentric sacramental spirituality.Donald Goergen, OP St. Dominic Priory St. Louis, Missouri Father Thomas Berry, CP, the foremost eco-theologian of our time, concluded after a lifetime of study that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, was the most important Christian thinker since St. Paul. More than half a century after Teilhard's death a number of Catholic scholars are deeply engaged in this transition from modern Christianity's focus on human-human relationships to a cosmological Catholicism keenly aware of nature as the primary revelation of God. With the strength of her intellectual synthesis and the depth of her scholarship, Dr. Linda Gibler, OP, is at the cutting edge of this transformation. Drawing from both the most ancient wisdom of the Catholic tradition and the new understanding of the universe from contemporary science, From the Beginning to Baptism enables its readers to understand the ways in which Baptism is a powerful entrance into that primordial Energy that once gave birth to the galaxies and later ignited the life in the first cells. Linda Gibler's readable work is both original and consequential. I know of no other work that attempts to provide such a carefully developed bridge between contemporary cosmological and scientific understandings of nature on the one hand, and sacramentality as liturgically understood on the other. Highly recommended.John F. Haught, PhD Senior Fellow, Science & Religion, Woodstock Theological Center Georgetown University, Washington, DC