After Writing provides a significant contribution to the growing genre of works which offer a challenge to the modern and postmodern accounts of Chistianity. The author shows how Platonic philsophy did not assume a primacy of metaphysical presence, as had been previously thought, but a primacy of liturgical theory and practice. Catherine Pickstock also provides a significant rethinking of Christian understandings of language, temporal and bodily life, and notions of the presence of God. Through a detailed reading of Phaedrus, the medieval Roman Rite, and a discussion of the theology of the Eucharist, the book indicates directions for the restoration of the liturgical order.