Different scholars in their diverse disciplines – theological, anthropological, historical or other – favour different taxonomies whereby to classify, assess and interpret the phenomena of their chosen specialisms. Clarity of understanding is, or should be, the telos of all such divisions and complex taxonomies can be the foe of clarity. By ‘drilling down’ as in the magisterial work of Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, a lucid taxonomy may profoundly illuminate the anthropological, theological or other endeavour. Thus Lonergan, for example, in his own quest for theological clarity and illumination identifies ‘eight functional specialities in theology, namely, (1) research, (2) interpretation, (3) history, (4) dialectic, (5) foundations, (6) doctrines, (7) systematics, and (8) communications’.

Throughout this volume we have adopted (1) a phenomenological and anthropological perspective, and constructed (2) a simple taxonomy of miracle narratives comprising food, water, blood, wood and stone and cosmology, while (3) deploying an elevenfold narratological sieve as a critical tool by which to identify major themes, motifs, metathemes and metamotifs. Islamic and Christian miracle traditions have been surveyed and analysed in tandem, thereby highlighting similarities, analogies and differences.

Thus our elevenfold narrative sieve interrogated its material from the perspectives of universality, multifacetedness, similarities and differences in content, themes and motifs, repetition, types and antitypes, intertextuality, the protagonist, attitudes to the miracle, significance of the miracle and, finally, the narratological catalyst which furnishes the ‘engine’ of the narrative.

Each chapter has begun with what I have termed a ‘proto-miracle’ before outlining a key pair of Islamic and Christian miracle narratives focused upon a single anthropological topos. The miracles chosen in all three sections are designed neither to be inclusive nor exclusive. Each chapter concludes with an assessment ‘in the narrative arena’. Attitudes surveyed in the text to putative miracles include those of the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’. Memory and memorialisation play a massive role in most of the miracle narratives which have been treated in this text.

The final taxonomy with which we shall conclude this narratological investigation into the realms of the miraculous in the two traditions of Islam and Christianity comprises a trio of this role of memory and hope together with the theme of Divine Presence.