"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your
mattress,/
And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).


Thursday, September 30, 2010

Long Live Robert F. Taft


The great--greatest--Byzantine liturgical historian Robert F. Taft is one of those people whom I could read and listen to non-stop. The erudition pours forth from him so effortlessly and elegantly that he makes it seem easy when in fact he is an enormously hard-working scholar's scholar whose CV has over 1000 items on it. I also love his unvarnished bluntness. He has an essay in this new collection, devoted to another liturgical scholar, Bryan Spinks of Yale:

Melanie Ross and Simon Jones, eds., The Serious Business of Worship: Essays in Honor of Bryan D. Spinks (London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010), 256pp. 

This book has not only Taft's essay, but in fact  the entire first section, consisting of five chapters, is devoted to Eastern traditions, with essays on Chrysostom, Armenian rites, and East-Syrian anaphoras, inter alia. It will be reviewed by Fr. Mark Morozowich (a student of Taft's) in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.

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