Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies

The spring issue (vol. 53, nos. 1-2) of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies is beginning to take shape quite nicely. I will have more details as articles move through the review process and are accepted. Here for now are just some of the books we are having reviewed:

Daniel Galadza reviews Stefano Parenti, A Oriente e Occidente di Costantinopoli. Temi e problemi liturgici di ieri e di oggi (2010), a collection of articles by Parenti, a professor of liturgy at the Pontificio Ateneo Sant'Anselmo in Rome and co-editor of the oldest Byzantine euchologion, Barberini gr. 336. Galadza notes that this collection helps to "answer fundamental problems troubling liturgical scholars for the last century."

Galadza also reviews a new book on the Liturgy of St. James first noted here.

Robert Klymasz, the Zurawecky Research Fellow at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies at the University of Manitoba, reviews Myrna Kostash, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, calling it a book whose journey leaves the reader "humbled, enlightened, and refreshed." 

Michael Plekon reviews Antoine Arjakovsky, En attendant le Concile de l'Eglise Orthodoxe. (For my own thoughts on this book, see the lengthy review here.) Plekon notes that this book "witnesses that he [Arjakovsky] is...a wonderful theologian of the Christian life in the 21st century."

Bradley Daugherty reviews Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, saying of it that it will "become a standard work and necessary reading for those seeking to understand the bishop of Carthage and his milieu."


Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen reviews John Renard, Islam and Christianity: Theological Themes in Comparative Perspective, calling it an "articulate and eloquent rendering of the major features of the theological language of Islam and Christianity."

North America's greatest Dante scholar, Anthony Esolen, reviews E.D. Karampetsos, Dante and Byzantium.

Michael Lower of the University of Minnesota reviews Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land. Asbridge's scholarship has attracted a great deal of attention recently, especially in Britain. Lower says that anyone interested in the Crusades "can learn a great deal from this book," which he further calls "a wonderful achievement."


Peter Galadza reviews Thomas Pott, Byzantine Liturgical Reform: A Study of Liturgical Change in the Byzantine Tradition. In a long, critical review, Galadza notes that the book is not without several problems, but that it raises crucial issues in a groundbreaking way and it "will become a classic work on Eastern Christian liturgical reform."


Myroslaw Tataryn reviews Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz, eds., Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, saying of this collection that it is "very readable, well organized, and highly recommended for its refreshing and thorough perspectives on contemporary Eastern Christianity."

Dante and Byzantium

The Syriac scholar Robert Murray has noted that Christianity has produced (at least) two truly towering theological poets: St. Ephraim the Syrian and Dante Alighieri.* In the fall issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies we will have a review of a new book about the latter and his Eastern influences:  E.D. Karampetsos, Dante and Byzantium (Somerset Hall Press, 2009), 194pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

No other writer has succeeded as extravagantly as Dante in putting a face on the invisible. Thanks to his inheritance from Byzantium, Dante possessed a wealth of visual resources, a means of organizing them, and a theoretical justification for their use. One discovers in Dante an extended network of Byzantine influences—St. John of Damascus, St. John Climacus, Plotinus, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and others. In this book, E.D. Karampetsos uncovers the profound influence of Byzantine theology, art, and ideas on Dante and his writing.

I asked the well-known Dante translator and scholar Anthony Esolen of Providence College to review this for Logos, and am greatly looking forward to his review.

Somerset Hall Press is a small press, but they have now published several books of interest to Eastern Christians in addition to the above. Perhaps most notable is their 2004 book by Athanasia Papademetriou, Presbytera: The Life, Mission, and Service of the Priest's Wife treating the topic of a married priesthood from the perspective of the "presbytera," that is, the wife of a presbyter. This is a rare and important contribution. 

In 2005 they published a collection of articles looking at the connections between Hellenism and Christianity: Demetrios J. Constantelos, Christian Faith and Cultural Heritage: Essays from a Greek Orthodox Perspective, which I briefly reviewed in Logos. 

In 2007, they published George P. Liacopulos, ed., Church and Society: Orthodox Christian Perspectives, Past Experiences, and Modern Challenges. I reviewed it in Logos also, drawing attention to several really important articles in the book, including:

• The Christology of St. Gregory of Nyssa, by Christos Th. Krikonis 
• Comments on Bible Translation, by Theodore Stylianopoulos

Stylianopoulos, whose The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective I have used in my classes to great benefit, has here written an article that is important and alarming in drawing attention to the  serious defects in many modern translations of the Bible; he focuses especially on the NRSV, showing how the ideological methods used in that translation have, especially in John's gospel, compromised the Christological nature of the text.  Stylianopoulos demonstrates how the NRSV not only obscures the relationship between Christ and His Father, but cannot even accurately translate basic Greek conjunctions and prepositions in some cases.
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*That excellent if little known scholarly revue Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies has an entire issue devoted to Ephraim the Syrian for those new to him and desirous of an introduction to his life and work.