Everlasting Memory!

On this Remembrance Day (as Her Britannic Majesty's Canadian Dominion calls it) or Veterans Day (as the American Republic styles it), our thoughts turn to those who have lost their lives in the many heinous conflicts of the last 100 years especially, beginning with World War I, on which myriad histories have been written, but some of the best that I have read include John Keegan, The First World War (Vintage, 2000); Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (1994); and, of course, Winston Churchill's six-volume history-cum-memoir, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, of which one of his detractors rather archly said that "Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis." Arthur Balfour, sometime British prime minister and sometime nemesis of Churchill, said of The World Crisis that he was reading Churchill's "autobiography disguised as a history of the universe."

Another fascinating study, about one of the bloodiest and most baffling of battles, is that of Christopher Duffy, Through German Eyes: The British & The Somme 1916 (Phoenix Press, 2007).

Duffy unearthed from Bavarian military archives German views of the British, whom many Germans held in condescending contempt as the "poor little men of a diseased civilization." Time and again, in the amusing records Duffy found, the German interrogators, confronted with British prisoners of war, could not believe that the former might lose the war to the latter's army of men of "crooked legs, rickety, alcoholic, degnerate, ill-bred, and poor to the last degree."

Centuries before the chimes of Big Ben in August 1914 signaled the commencement of hostilities between Britain and Germany, and so unleashed the one event that arguably more than any other shaped the rest of the century, many Christians had set themselves to asking if and when, and under which circumstances, lethal force might be used, or at least tolerated, by Christians. That gave rise to what came, in the West, to be known as the Just War tradition, of which today James Turner Johnson is perhaps the leading scholar in several books, including Ethics and the Use of Force (Justice, International Law and Global Security, Ashgate, 2011); Morality and Contemporary Warfare (Yale, 2001); Can Modern War be Just? (Yale, 1986); and Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, 1984). Others who have thought deeply about these issues, and helped Christians to do so today, include Michael Walzer, Just And Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations (Basic, 2006); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Theory (Readings in Social and Political Theory) (NYU, 1991).

Much of the Just War tradition is traced back, of course, to Augustine of Hippo (on whom the study by John Mark Mattox, St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War [Continuum, 2009] is the most recent). Many Eastern Christians have felt uneasy about Augustine for many reasons, some serious and some not--as I noted before. But whatever you think of him and his influence, it cannot be denied that Augustine gave rise to a very long, serious trajectory of intellectual work thinking through the hard problems of war and peace. Not as much work has been done in an Eastern Christian context, though Alexander Webster's two books, The Pacifist Option: The Moral Argument Against War in Eastern Orthodox Theology (ISP, 1999); and Virtue Of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West (2007) are notable exceptions.

Now, however, we have a very welcome new contribution to the discussion, published in September of this year: Hildo Bos and Jim Forest, For the Peace from Above: An Orthodox Resource Book on War, Peace and Nationalism (ORI, 2011).

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Since the early days of the Church, Christians have struggled to come to terms with Christ's words of peace and His example of peace. In Christ's life, as recorded in the New Testament, it is striking that He neither killed anyone nor summoned any of His disciples to kill. Indeed, the final miracle Christ performed before His execution was to heal an enemy's wound, an injury caused by the Apostle Peter in an attempt to defend his master. Yet, in the course of more than twenty centuries of Christian history, we see Christians often involved in war and, in surveying the calendar of saints, find not only those who refused to take part in war but also those who served in the military, though no one has been canonized due to his skill as a soldier. Besides the millions of Christians who have fought in armies, often against fellow Christians, we also find many priests, bishops and theologians who have advocated war and blessed its weapons. Our subject is an urgent one. Many people today live either near conflict areas or are directly touched by war or in areas where terrorist actions may suddenly occur. Everyone on the planet is in some way affected by wars in progress or wars in the making as well as the consequences of wars in the past. Every day thousands of Christians struggle in thought and prayer with some of the most difficult of questions: May I fight injustice by violent methods? Am I allowed to kill in combat? Are there limits on what I can do in the defense of my country? Am I as a Christian allowed to disobey demands that I believe are unjust or violate the Gospel? When the demands of my country seem at odds with the demands of the Kingdom of God, how do I respond to this conflict? Rarely do we find easy answers to these and similar questions.

Those of us in the Orthodox Christian tradition search for help in Holy Scripture, the canons provided to us by ecumenical councils, the witness of the saints, the writing of the Fathers of the Church as well as theologians of recent times. Imitation of saintly forebears alone, however, will not solve our problems. Different eras have adopted different attitudes. Also many of today's problems never existed before, not least the changed character of war in an era of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and mass propaganda. Yet knowledge of the thought and action undertaken by the Orthodox Churches on the issues of war and peace in recent decades surely can help us find ways out of the dead ends that many communities are experiencing today. This is the aim of this book.

Orthodoxy and Science

How ought Eastern Christians to relate to the sciences in such matters as, e.g., creation or sexuality? How can we understand the relationship between the truths revealed in Scripture and those found in creation? A new book, under the editorship of Daniel Buxhoeveden and Gayle Woloschak, eds., Science and the Eastern Orthodox Church (Ashgate, October 2011), 232pp., may help with some of these questions.

About this book, whose contents you may view here, the publisher tells us:

Science and the Eastern Orthodox Church explores core theological and philosophical notions and contentious topics such as evolution from the vantage point of science, Orthodox theology, and the writings of popular recent Orthodox critics as well as supporters. Examining what science is and why Eastern Orthodox Christians should be concerned about the topic, including a look at well known 20th century figures that are considered holy elders or saints in the Orthodox Church and their relationship and thoughts about science, contributors analyse the historical contingencies that contribute to the relationship of the Orthodox Church and science both in the past and present. Part II includes critiques of science and considers its limitations and strengths in light of Orthodox understandings of the experience of God and the so called miraculous, together with analysis of two Orthodox figures of the 20th century that were highly critical of science, it's foundations and metaphysical assumptions. Part III looks at selected topics in science and how they relate to Orthodox theology, including evolution, brain evolution and consciousness, beginning of life science, nanotechnology, stem cell research and others. Drawing together leading Orthodox scientists, theologians, and historians confronting some of the critical issues and uses of modern science, this book will be useful for students, academics and clergy who want to develop a greater understanding of how to relate Orthodoxy to science.

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Sacramental Tapestry

I have just received a fascinating new book written by Hans Boersma: Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Eerdmans, 2011), xii+206pp.

What is this book about? Here is the publisher's blurb:

Surveying the barriers that contemporary thinking has erected between the natural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven, Hans Boersma issues a wake-up call for Western Christianity. Both Catholics and evangelicals, he says, have moved too far away from a sacramental mindset, focusing more on the "here-and-now" than on the "then-and-there." Yet, as Boersma points out, the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and St. Augustine -- indeed, of most of Scripture and the church fathers -- is profoundly otherworldly, much more concerned with heavenly participation than with earthly enjoyment.

In Heavenly Participation Boersma draws on the wisdom of great Christian minds ancient and modern -- Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, C. S. Lewis, Henri de Lubac, John Milbank, and many others. He urges Catholics and evangelicals alike to retrieve a sacramental worldview, to cultivate a greater awareness of eternal mysteries, to partake eagerly of the divine life that transcends and transforms all earthly realities.

While much of the book is taken up with a dialogue between evangelical and Catholic sources, there is, as noted above, a great deal of patristic wisdom pressed into service here from such as Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, and other Eastern Christians whom Boersma discusses, including Alexander Schmemann, Andrew Louth, and Maximus the Confessor.

Architecture as Icon

Of the books about icons, there is no end. A recent collection takes an expansive look at Slobodan Curcis and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos with Kathleen E. McVey and Helen G. Sardi, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art (Princeton University Art Museum Series) (Yale University Press, 2010), 376pp., 20 b/w + 185 color ill.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Presenting the first formulation of the central subject, this volume challenges major assumptions long held by Western art historians and provides new ways of thinking about, looking at, and understanding Byzantine art in its broadest geographic and chronological framework, from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century.Byzantine art abandoned classical ideals in favor of formulas that conveyed spiritual concepts through stylized physical forms. Scholarship dealing with Byzantine icons has previously been largely focused on depictions of holy figures, dismissing representations of architecture as irrelevant space-filling background. Architecture as Icon demonstrates that background representations of architecture are meaningful, active components of compositions, often as significant as the human figures.

The book provides a critical view for understanding the Byzantine conception of architectural forms and space and the corresponding intellectual underpinnings of their representation.Introduced by four thought-provoking essays, the catalogue divides the material as included in the exhibition into four categories identified as: generic, specific, and symbolic representations, and a final grouping entitled “From Earthly to Heavenly Jerusalem.” This handsomely illustrated volume addresses various approaches to depicting architecture in Byzantine art that contrast sharply with those of the Renaissance and subsequent Western artistic tradition.

St. Gregoire de Nazianze

Of the study of the Fathers there is no end. This is especially true if one of those Father happens to have been as influential as, e.g., Augustine of Hippo or the Cappadocians. For the latter, scholarship continues apace as with, e.g., this recent book devoted to him to whom the East has granted the exceedingly rare honorific suffix of "the Theologian": A Schmidt, ed., Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca (CCSG 73 [CN 24]): Gregorius Nazianzenus Studia Nazianzenica II (Brepols, 2011), xii+741pp., 38 b/w ill. + 28 colour ill. 

With articles in French, English, and German,

ce volume qui regroupe vingt-cinq études philologiques, lexicales et littéraires, est consacré aux œuvres de Grégoire de Nazianze (Poèmes, Discours et commentaires sur Grégoire).  Il ouvre de nouvelles perspectives sur la réception de Grégoire dans les traditions byzantine, syriaque, arménienne, arabe et particulièrement géorgienne ; c’est l’objet de la plupart des études, mais d’autres contributions posent la question du rapport entre texte et miniatures dans les manuscrits grecs et géorgiens (Discours 44) ou font le point sur le projet de recherche en lexicologie grecque du Thesaurus Patrum Graecorum dont fait partie la concordance des discours de Grégoire. Le livre se base sur les éditions et recherches entreprises au Centre d’Etudes sur Grégoire de Nazianze à l’Universite catholique de Louvain dans le contexte d’une collaboration internationale, avec l’Institut des Manuscrits de Tbilisi en particulier. Il fait suite aux Studia Nazianzenica I publiées en 2000.

Counting Orthodox in North America

I have been listening to Ancient Faith Radio's coverage of the sixteenth All-America Council of the Orthodox Church of America. One of the presenters was Alexei Krindatch, editor of a volume I reviewed earlier. I thought I would re-post that review and also a new link, which he mentioned in his presentation: There is at that link a great deal of fascinating and useful statistical material on the numbers of affiliated and practicing Orthodox Christians in North America, number of monasteries, geographical distribution, and so on. All this data reveals a portrait of Orthodoxy on this continent that is far, far smaller than many imagined. (Krindatch says that average Sunday attendance in the OCA is 33,000.) For too long, when asked how many Orthodox there were in North America, one was often fobbed off with breezy figures wildly inflated. (As Robert Taft has said, "'Eastern' and 'statistics' is an oxymoron.") But the data also helpfully undermine the idea that Orthodoxy is overwhelmingly "ethnic." That is increasingly not the case, and has been so for some time. Orthodoxy on this continent is more catholic than in many other places.

The Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches packs an incredible amount of very useful data into a surprisingly affordable book. Given how affordable it is, no serious library--whether personal, parochial, or academic--should be without this book. 

After a brief introduction, including discussion of terminology and methodology, the book opens with a very helpful time-line tracing the presence of Eastern Christianity in North America from 1618-2010. A longer historical essay follows, fleshing out some of the dates and events in more detail. Then we have "Ten Interesting Facts about the History of Orthodox Christianity in the USA," which contains a few mild surprises. Then we move into what is, in my view, the highlight of the book: the maps. We have a series of maps tracing out Orthodox populations in each state, from 1906 to 2010. This data is presented in a variety of ways which is most helpful. 

After this, we move alphabetically through a series of overviews of each Orthodox Church (canonical and one or two of the uncanonical ones--e.g., Old Calendarists) present in the United States, starting with the Albanian Orthodox Diocese of America and ending with the Syriac Church of Antioch. Each of these presentations is standardized, and begins with basic data about where the church was founded, its current headquarters, contact information, chief hierarch, and basic numerical data: number of adherents, number of monasteries, average attendance rates, etc. A brief essay follows, tracing out the development of each church, and in some cases ending with a ''Further Information" section that often gives a handful of references to both books or websites. (These reference lists, not all of which are formatted properly, are the one weak part of the book because they often overlook major studies of real importance.) After the essay, we then come to the maps, showing the number of parishes and adherents in the various states, including on a county-by-county basis. These are laid out very lucidly and at a glance you can pick up major concentrations.

The authors and editors write without any apologetical agenda, and so do not shy away from presenting the unhappy parts of Orthodox history, e.g., mentioning the schism in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese that lasted until 1975, or the current challenges that have arisen more recently in that jurisdiction and others. Equally impressive is the fact that membership figures, including average attendance, seem very credible and do not appear to suffer from the kind of inflation or guesswork I have seen elsewhere among some who would have us believe that there are scores of millions of practicing Orthodox in this country. 

Chapter 3 is devoted to monastic life. After a brief essay stressing its history and importance, it goes on to discuss the "more than 80 monasteries [that] function presently in the United States" (122). These are then detailed in a chart giving location, ecclesial affiliation, sex, and whether the monastery accepts outside visitors. There then follows a directory of monasteries, giving more detailed geographic and contact information, including websites and e-mail addresses, and how many outside visitors, if any, may be accepted and for how long. For those desirous of making a retreat, this is very useful information to have.

The fourth and final chapter is one long running table breaking down the data of the "2010 US National Census of Orthodox Christian Churches." This amasses in table form what has been presented earlier in cartographic form.

A two-page appendix concludes the book with a brief list of websites and books for additional reading.

Quibbles: the entry for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church sticks the definite article in front of the country: ''the Ukraine." It also makes use of ecumenically infelicitous terminology (''Uniates") for describing Ukrainian Greco-Catholics. And, as noted earlier, many of the reference lists for further reading are non-existent in some cases or otherwise dated and incomplete. But these are minor issues in what is an excellent achievement, long overdue. The Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches is a very welcome book and deserves a wide audience. 

Antoine Arjakovsky on the Great and Holy Council

I have on several occasions previously noted the important work of the Russian Orthodox historian Antoine Arjakovsky, author of such works as Entretiens avec le cardinal Lubomyr Husar. Earlier this year, as I noted at the time, he published another big book on the topic of the much-promised but much-delayed "great and holy council" of the Orthodox Churches: En attendant le Concile de l'Église Orthodoxe (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2011), 682pp.

Antoine Arjakovsky is a fascinating figure: a Russian Orthodox scholar from France who was the founding director of the Ecumenical Institute at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about relations between the Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches in the last sixty years will know what an extraordinary thing it is to have a Russian Orthodox working for a Ukrainian Catholic institution, and dealing with ecumenism of all things, which is regularly reprobated by some Orthodox as the “pan-heresy.” In 2007, Arjakovsky published Church, Culture, and Identity: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the Modern World (Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press), which I very favorably reviewed the following year in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. That book, I confess, made me change my mind on one important issue: eucharistic hospitality between Catholics and Orthodox. I am and remain greatly indebted to Arjakovsky for cogently compelling me to re-think that issue.

His 2007 book began by declaring that “the Orthodox world is in crisis.” One of the long-standing proposals for helping Orthodoxy overcome its crisis in the world of today has been to call a “great and holy council” of all the Orthodox Churches of the world. This proposed council has been discussed by many Orthodox since at least 1923 (see Patrick Viscuso’s fascinating 2007 book A Quest For Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress, An Analysis and Translation of Its Acts and Decisions for early conciliar proposals), but as of 2011 is still a distant prospect. In fact, the very phrase “great and holy council” has occasioned some rather skeptical eye-rolling among some for whom such a council is an eschatological prospect, not to be realized in history.

For all that, however, discussions of such a council have, it is true, become much more prevalent in the last five years or so, led by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople and its proposals for regional gatherings (“episcopal assemblies”). Why have councils at all, and what should this upcoming one—if it ever happens—be expected to do? These are some of the questions Arjakovsky takes up indirectly in his big book En attendant le Concile de l'Église Orthodoxe. (What lies below is the English original review of this book; the review will also be published in Ukrainian in Patriyarkhat. Michael Plekon will be reviewing this book in 2012 in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.) 

I approached this book initially thinking it was going to lay out a systematic case for the importance of the council, perhaps proceeding historically (Arjakovsky is trained as an historian), but it does not. This book—with a prologue and foreword, thirty-one chapters in four sections, an epilogue, and six appendices—tackles a wide variety of subjects. This book, like wider Orthodoxy, seems to be in no hurry to arrive at a particular destination. Two words in the title hint at this: “Waiting on the Council of the Orthodox Church: A Spiritual and Ecumenical Journey.” Arjakovsky’s book, then, offers the reader a very wide-ranging and astute analysis of the “signs of the times” (to use a phrase that the Second Vatican Council made famous) that any council must attend to.

Given the size and breadth of this collection, no review can cover everything. His first section has only two chapters and treats the postwar development of Orthodox theology. This section is useful for several reasons, not least in debunking the idea promoted by some Catholics and Orthodox alike that Orthodox thought never changes. His second section is “Towards a Practical Ecumenism”; the third, “Convergences Between Social Doctrines of the Churches”; and his fourth, “The Future of Ecumenism in Ukraine and Russia.” I will confine myself to his last and longest section but before I do so, however, let me urge Orthodox readers especially to take heed of two chapters, “The Orthodox Churches and Ecumenism” and “Eucharistic Hospitality Among Christians.” Some Orthodox today tediously claim (based on wild misunderstandings of the concept, process, and loyalty of the hierarchs and theologians involved) that “ecumenism” is a “pan-heresy” and they are horrified at the idea of eucharistic sharing with Catholics even though the historical and theological case for doing so, as Arjakovsky lays it out here and in his earlier book, is indubitable. 

Arjakovsky begins his fourth section with a short reflection on Pope St. Clement, about whom few details are certain though it seems he was the fourth bishop of Rome, perhaps ordained by St. Peter, and the first of the so-called apostolic fathers. Clement, after falling from imperial favor, was exiled to Kherson and probably martyred by drowning in the Black Sea. Today his relics are scattered in Rome, the Kyivan Caves Monastery, and in the Crimea. Arjakovsky briefly recounts some of these details in order to argue that the Church of Kyiv has always had a connection to West-Rome even as it has received its faith from East-Rome. This, he says, is a model of “double communion” that remains important today: the Church of Kyiv can and should show that it is possible to have communion with both Rome and Constantinople. He develops this idea with much greater historical detail in his next chapter, tracing out chronologically the diversity of Eastern Christians now present in Kyiv and all of Ukraine—the three Orthodox Churches, and of course the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church. (This chapter reminded me of Catherine Wanner’s book, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism [Cornell University Press, 2007], in which she notes that Ukraine could become a model for the rest of Europe by being both secular but filled with robust religious groups freely practicing their faith and influencing society for the good.)

In his chapter “Friendship and the Ecumenical Institute of Lviv,” Arjakovsky reflects briefly on the gospel passage (John 15:13-17) where Christ instructs His disciples on the true nature of friendship. Arjakovsky stresses the importance of this for the healing of Christian divisions: it is one thing to have official theological dialogue, and to issue statements between churches, but it is quite another for Christians of different churches to come together in friendship as they did, he says, in such bodies as the Kyivan Church Study Group. Until and unless Catholics and Orthodox begin to be friends with one another on the most basic human level, the prospects of one united Church, both in Ukraine and elsewhere, will remain highly unlikely.

Arjakovsky’s twenty-fourth chapter, “Memories of the Pseudo-Synod of Lviv,” is extremely important. As I noted at the top of this review, he is Russian Orthodox, and the Russian Orthodox Church, of course, collaborated in the violent suppression and attempted destruction of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in 1946 at the pseudo-synod of Lviv. To this day, the Russian Church has refused to acknowledge that spurious synod as anything other than the legitimate “return” of the “uniates” to their rightful “mother-church” of Moscow. (Since East-Slavic Christianity began, as everyone knows, with the conversion of the Kyivan Rus' under Grand Prince Vladimir, the idea that Moscow is the "mother-church" is as Andriy Chirovsky said, "specious, since Moscow received Christianity from Kyivan missionaries two hundred years after Kyiv accepted the faith from Constantinople. The Moscow Church cannot be its mother's mother.") What makes Arjakovsky’s chapter so powerful is not merely the fact that he is Russian Orthodox. As a well-trained historian, he simply lays out the evidence without polemics or hysterics, allowing the demonstrable mendacity of the Russian claims to become clear, and not just about the events of 1946, but also about the events from 1989 onward. Thus Arjakovsky notes that Russian claims—whether in 1946, 1991, or 2011—that Ukraine (especially Galicia) is somehow part of its Orthodox “canonical territory” is simply nonsense:

la difficulté ici n’est pas seulement que la justification historique présentée est loin de pouvoir convaincre. Le principal problème est que le patriarcat de Moscou ná eu à aucun moment de son histoire de juridiction en Galicie ! L’Église de Kiev-Halitch a toujours relevé du patriarcat de Constantinople (499). 

This chapter is especially useful in updating the discussion with all the documentation issued in 2006 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the pseudo-synod. Thus we read the letter from Pope Benedict XVI on the anniversary, the letter from then-president Victor Yuschenko, and a handful of rather reluctant acknowledgements from some Orthodox, including Nicolas Lossky. In the end, though, as Arjakovsky notes, memories of 1946 remain an enormous wound (“une blessure profonde”) that, in truth and justice, must be acknowledged and then healed.

Let us finish by attending briefly to his epilogue, where Arjakovsky turns autobiographical. Here, reflecting on his marriage and love for his wife Laure, who is Roman Catholic, he notes that it is precisely love that makes all Christians one: “dans l’amour, nous formons un seul corps.” This love, they both fervently believe, can, as Saint Paul says in I Cor. 13:7, overcome all. Arjakovsky’s life is a witness of that: his love for Ukrainian Catholics, and ours for him, is a wonderful model. Let all of us, Catholics and Orthodox alike, be inspired by the courageous and gracious example of Laure and especially Antoine Arjakovsky to ask the Lord for this love—in our marriages and families, our communities, and between our Churches—that overcomes division so that the world might believe.  

Muslim-Christian Bridge-Building

As the Orthodox theologian Theodore Pulcini wrote last year in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the dialogue between Christians--especially Eastern Christians--and Muslims is likely to prove to be the most important such dialogue in our time and for some time to come. A recent publication aids that dialogue by exploring some fundamental questions of theological anthropology:

Michael Ipgrave and David Marshall, eds., Humanity Texts and Contexts: Christian and Muslim Perspectives a Record of the Sixth Building Bridges Seminar Convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Georgetown University Press, 2011), 158pp.

About this book and its series, and the dialogue in general, the publisher says:

"Humanity: Texts and Contexts" is a record of the 2007 Singapore "Building Bridges" seminar, an annual dialogue between Muslim and Christian scholars cosponsored by Georgetown University and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This volume explores three central questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the significance of the diversity that is evident among human beings? And what are the challenges that humans face living within the natural world? A distinguished group of scholars focuses on the theological responses to each of these questions, drawing on the wealth of material found in both Christian and Islamic scriptures. Part one lays out the three issues of human identity, difference, and guardianship. Part two explores scriptural texts side by side, pairing Christian and Islamic scholars who examine such themes as human dignity, human alienation, human destiny, humanity and gender, humanity and diversity, and humanity and the environment. In addition to contributions from an international cast of outstanding scholars, the book includes an afterword by Archbishop Rowan Williams.

Eucharistic Communion and the World

I am delighted that T&T Clark has just now put into my hands the most recent book of the great Greek theologian John Zizioulas, Eucharistic Communion and the World (2011, xv+186pp). What is this book about? The publisher tells us that:

The theology of John Zizioulas presents a beautiful vision of the Church as Eucharistic communion, in which human persons both are gathered into Jesus Christ and are sent back into the world. In his previous books, Zizioulas focused on the way this communion is related to the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which calls us to understand being as communion and provides the only foundation for otherness and identity. With its sustained attention directly to the Eucharistic communion, this volume provides the context for those discussions. Zizioulas here explores the biblical dimensions and eschatological foundation of the Eucharist, the celebration of the Eucharist by the Church, and the ethos of the Eucharistic community. These essays are provocatively concrete and practical, showing once again that Zizioulas’ teaching on persons, communion and otherness has radical implications for the life of the Church and its relationship to the world. 

In addition, the publisher supplies the following table of contents:

Chapter One: Biblical Aspects of the Eucharist

Chapter Two: The Eucharist and The Kingdom of God

Chapter Three: Symbolism and Realism in Orthodox Worship

Chapter Four: The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist

Chapter Five: Reflections on Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist

Chapter Six: The Eucharistic Vision of the World

Chapter Seven: Proprietors or Priests of Creation?

Chapter Eight: Preserving God's Creation

Allah: A Christian Response

In my classes on Eastern Christianity and the Encounter with Islam, I am regularly asked how a Christian ought to view Allah. Is the God of the New Testament the same as the God of the Quran? Are they completely and irreconcilably different figures? Are there similarities between them? And is it more important to understand the similarities or emphasize the differences? Too much of the emphasis, for obvious political reasons, has been lately on emphasizing similarities, almost invariably at a cost of being completely truthful and faithful to both Christian and Islamic theological sources. Following Stephen Prothero, in his fascinating new book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World I take a dim view of efforts to conjure connections or suggest similarities solely to make people feel good while holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Those who do that either do not know what they are talking about or are being deliberately obscurantist in their approach, or both. The responsible approach, it seems to me, is to allow both Christian and Islamic traditions to speak for themselves without forcing them together artificially--but equally without polemically blasting them apart into two solitudes. 

These are questions that animate a new book by Myroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (HarperOne, 2011), 336pp.

About this book, the publisher says:

Three and a half billion people—the majority of the world’s population—profess Christianity or Islam. Renowned scholar Miroslav Volf’s controversial proposal is that Muslims and Christians do worship the same God—the only God. As Volf reveals, warriors in the “clash of civilizations” have used “religions”—each with its own god and worn as a badge of identity—to divide and oppose, failing to recognize the one God whom Muslims and Christians understand in partly different ways.

Writing from a Christian perspective, and in dialogue with leading Muslim scholars and leaders from around the world, Volf reveals surprising points of intersection and overlap between these two faith traditions:

• What the Qur’an denies about God as the Holy Trinity has been denied by every great teacher of the church in the past and ought to be denied by Christians today.

• A person can be both a practicing Muslim and 100 percent Christian without denying core convictions of belief and practice.

• How two faiths, worshiping the same God, can work toward the common good under a single government.

Volf explains the hidden agendas behind today’s news stories as he thoughtfully considers the words of religious leaders and parses the crucial passages from the Bible and the Qur’an that continue to ignite passion. Allah offers a constructive way forward by reversing the “our God vs. their God” premise that destroys bridges between neighbors and nations, magnifies fears, and creates strife.

I've already started reading it, and will have more to say about it on here later.

Eastern Christianity and Islam (IV): The Syriac Churches

Syria is of course much in the news today because of on-going political instability and unrest in this year of the so-called Arab Spring. Relations between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Syria are rather more complicated than simplistic media narratives would have us believe, and many Christians in the country are on the side of the government in the current unrest, fearing (with good reason) that the alternatives are much worse. An Antiochian Orthodox priest from Texas, Joseph Huneycutt, who recently visited Syria to find out what Christian-Muslim relations are really like today, has written up a six-part series on his visit that is informative in this regard. If and when Noriko Sato's oft-delayed book Orthodox Christians in Syria (Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series) is published, we may have further details--though the situation is so fluid that the danger of any book being published is that it can instantly end up out being out of date.

We are, however, seeing an increasing number of scholarly studies of Christian-Muslim relations in Syria in historical perspective; I noted a few of them earlier in this series. The focus on Syria reminds us that it was in every sense of the word on the forefront of Arab Muslim conquests in the seventh century.

Now another welcome collection has recently been published: Dietmar W. Winkler, ed., Syriac Churches Encountering Islam: Past Experiences and Future Perspectives (Pro Oriente Studies in the Syriac Tradition) (Gorgias Press, 2010), xii+253pp.

There are, I want to stress, riches in this book that others could and should benefit from. These riches, alas, are heavily obscured thanks to the fact that many of the contributors wrote in a language obviously not native to them and the book was "edited" by an Austrian. Why a publisher would allow such an arrangement is a mystery; but the greater mystery is why this book was not copy-edited in any form by a competent anglophone. I should be hugely embarrassed as an editor and publisher to put into print a book (especially one so steeply priced as this) whose nearly every page is positively scrofulous with errors, the worst being Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim's chapter, "The Syrian Churches During the Umayyad Era," which, a mere seventeen pages in length, has, by my count, 144 (one-hundred-and-forty-four) errors in it. Line after line, paragraph after paragraph, page after page: they are all so filled with errors as to render much of his text incomprehensible. Errors of spelling, grammar, style, formatting, and fact fill every page; but my favorite has to be the howler repeated regularly by the author in his reference to "St. Simeon the Stylist [sic]." Ah--so the mystery is at last revealed: atop his pillar (στυλος), one finds a hairdressing shop tended by St. Simeon the Stylite! I should certainly find the prospect of working in a beauty salon an extreme askesis indeed, but this is not what Simeon endured.

Joseph Yacoub's article "Christian Minorities in the Countries of the Middle East: a Glimpse to the Present Situation and Future Prospects" was obviously written (based on the dated material he cites) at least five, and like more, years ago now. He does not inspire confidence in the reader when, at the outset, he purports to introduce the different Christians in the Middle East, and says that "in Jordan, there are Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics (Melkites), and Eastern Christians of the Latin rite" (173). What is that last phrase supposed to mean? On the next page he seems to compound the problem by claiming that, among others, "the oriental Christians are....the Latins and the Protestants," also a bizarre categorization. He ends his introduction by saying "this paper will focus on Syriac Christianity" but on the very next line he dives into "Iraq: a decimated Christianity" and spends the next twenty-six pages (more than half the chapter) attacking the American invasion of Iraq ("the crusade launched by George W. Bush" and supported by "Christian fundamentalists in the entourage of George Bush" with ostensible ideological support, and financial backing, from the nefarious "National Association of Evangelicals" which, in case we miss the point, is "linked to the Republican party"). This screed proceeds with all the de haut en bas attitude sometimes attributed to French academics in the popular imagination. It is sloppy, dripping with condescension, and wildly off target. When he finally turns to Christians in Syria and, even more briefly, Turkey, he says nothing that has not been better said, with much greater and more current detail, elsewhere.

Syria reappears in "Culture and Coexistence in Syria" by Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, but this short article (barely six pages in length) is also riddled with errors, and one's confidence, already very shaky after the previous encounter earlier in the book with this author, is destroyed at the outset by the author's absurd and utterly unprecedented claim that "Historically, the See of Antioch was the first See in Christendom" (222). The hairdressing Simeon shows up again at least once here.

Dietmar Winkler's article "Christian Responses to Islam in the Umayyad Period" is a marked by many typos, but it tells an extremely important story and reinforces Griffith's point (noted below) that no Christian rejoiced in the Arab-Muslim invasion. Those who claim this are almost invariably people who have no facility in the original texts, and instead repeat received myths that no serious historian accepts. Indeed, Winkler makes it clear that "the fact that within a century of the death of Muhammad (632) Islam had spread across much of the known world was for many Christians inexplicable, frightening, and theologically incomprehensible" (72).

The one chapter on Islam in India deals with "Christian-Muslim Relationships on the Malabar Coast" by Baby Varghese. The jist of his article--which is too short, and unaccountably ends in 1964, with no mention of anything that has happened since then--is that relations between the Thomas Christians of Kerala (and other Syriac-derived Christian groups) and the Muslims who later arrived there were decent until Portuguese Christians (Roman Catholics) begin showing up at the end of the fifteenth century. Then the Portuguese, in their religio-cultural chauvinism, began buggering things up for everybody, treating both the native Christians and Muslims with violent hostility and contempt.

The highlight of this book has to be Sidney Griffith's article, "The Syriac-Speaking Churches and the Muslims in the Medinan Era of Muhammad and the Four Caliphs." Anyone who knows Griffith's work knows he is rightly recognized today as one of the world's leading scholars of the ancient encounter between Christians and Muslims, especially in Syria. This has been demonstrated in over three decades' worth of scholarship in many places, including perhaps most notably The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. 

With his customary lucidity, care, and command of the sources, Griffith first demonstrates just how influential Syriac Christianity was on the composition of the Quran: "the Qur'an itself is the best witness to the Christian presence in Muhammad's world"(17), not least because of the "Syriacisms in the Arabic diction" and by "how much of the Qur'an's eschatology echoes that of the classical Syriac writers" (19).

Griffth then turns to Christian reactions to Islam, which of course were varied depending on place and time. Often a common initial reaction was that the "scourge of the Saracens" was sent by God to chastise the Christians and bring them back to repentance and holiness. At no point did any Christian ever understand the invasion to be a good thing, still less something to be welcomed with open arms. This absurd myth, repeated as recently as a few weeks ago as I noted on here, is debunked once again by Griffith, who shows that the idea of Coptic welcome of invasion stems from a notoriously misquoted and misunderstood letter from Isho'yabh III (d. 659), patriarch of the "Church of the East." When read in context, that letter, on "closer inspection reveals that the writers were not so much voicing a welcome for what we recognize in hindsight as the onset of the Islamic conquest as they were invidiously comparing even Arab rule, which they disdained, to the oppressive conduct of their previous governors....[T]he Christians of all denominations unanimously regarded the conquest as a disaster"(28).

Mar Julius Mikhael Al-Jamil's article "The Personal Status of Christians in the Ottoman Empire" is a short treatment of the infamous millet system and the ritual of firman or berat, the investiture of (initially) Greek, Armenian, and Jewish leaders as the ethnarchs heading up their respective communities--a list later much expanded to include other ethno-religious communities given such arrangements under pressure from Western (especially French) powers at the sunset of the Ottoman Empire. This topic has been treated elsewhere at greater length and with more detail than one finds here.

Karam Risk's article "Christians Build a State--Lebanon" ends the book. It is a mere nine pages, and therefore treats Lebanese history with extreme brevity, ending with a paean to Lebanon whose "future remains radiant and luminous."

In the end, the intent of this collection was noble indeed. It brings together some fascinating material still not well known today, and in fact still often wildly (sometimes intentionally) misrepresented and misunderstood. But the execution of too many articles, and of the book as a whole, leaves much to be desired. This is greatly to be regretted because we desperately need good scholarship today more than ever. The search continues.

New Book on Icon Painting

Aidan Hart has just published what looks to be a most impressive book on the techniques of icon painting. (I am aware that some insist on speaking of "icon writing" but that is often an affectation based on overlooking the multivalence of Greek and Slavonic in which the verbs "to write" and "to draw" are so closely related as to be susceptible of either translation into English.)

Aidan Hart, Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting: Egg Tempera, Fresco, Secco (Gracewing, 2011), 460pp. + 450 colour illustrations + 160 drawings.

About this book we are told:

This is the most comprehensive book to date on the techniques of icon and wall painting. Illustrated by over 450 colour ilustrations and over 160 drawings, it is a source of pleasure and inspiration for the general reader as well as for the practising icon painter. More than just a technical manual, it sets artistic practice in the context of the Church's spirituality and liturgy, with chapters on the theology and history of the icon, and the reasons behind the placement of wall paintings within churches.

The book carries a slew of impressive endorsements, including from the well-known Orthodox theologian and hierarch, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, who writes in the preface: 

I know of no comparable work in the English language that deals with the technique of icon painting in such a thorough and comprehensive manner. Yet, while concerned with technique, the treatment is never merely technical. At every point we see how technique reveals a transfigured world. Spirituality and technology are combined together, so that each illuminates the other.

Another endorsement comes from Sr. Wendy Beckett, whose own recent book on icons I favorably discussed on here earlier:

An icon is visual theology, the Word of God. It can only be written in truth by one who seeks and loves this holy Word. Aidan Hart understands this to the depth.

On Hart's website, you may view a detailed table of contents, some sample plates, and find an order form to buy the book. 

Just in Time for Christmas

Two months from today, if you can imagine, is Christmas. It's not too early to start thinking about what gifts would give the greatest delight to the Eastern Christian bibliophile in your family. Try, for example, to think of the joy of your family and friends when they unwrap a copy of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. Spread the joy this season--order your copy, and enough for your 93 closest friends and family, today!

Damascene Developments

As what we today call Islam begins in the seventh century its campaign of expansion out of the Arabian peninsula and into Syria, Egypt, and beyond, what was life like in those newly conquered territories, beginning with the first of them, Syria? What did Islam do to the Christians in Syria--and others--and the long-established religious culture of the region? A new book comes along to help us understand these questions more deeply: Nancy Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest: Text and Image in Early Islam (OUP USA, 2011), 224pp.

 

About this book, the publisher says that

Unlike other histories of the early Islamic period, which focus on the political and military aspects of the conquests, this book is about narrative history and the constitution of identity in the changing and dynamic landscape of the early Islamic world.

Before it fell to Muslim armies in AD 635-6 Damascus had a long and prestigious history as a center of Christianity. How did the city, which became capital of the Islamic Empire, and its people, negotiate the transition from a late antique, or early Byzantine world to an Islamic culture? In this innovative study, Nancy Khalek demonstrates that the changes that took place in Syria during the formative period of Islamic life were not a matter of the replacement of one civilization by another as a result of military conquest, but rather of shifting relationships and practices in a multi-faceted social and cultural setting. Even as late antique forms of religion and culture persisted, the formation of Islamic identity was effected by the people who constructed, lived in, and narrated the history of their city. Khalek draws on the evidence of architecture, and the testimony of pilgrims, biographers, geographers, and historians to shed light on this process of identity formation. Offering a fresh approach to the early Islamic period, she moves the study of Islamic origins beyond a focus on issues of authenticity and textual criticism, and initiates an interdisciplinary discourse on narrative, story-telling, and the interpretations of material culture.        

Greek Patristic and Orthodox Interpretations of Romans

Great are the numbers of commentaries on Romans by prominent theologians ancient and modern. But in the modern period, Eastern studies of this text are not as numerous nor as prominent as, e.g., Karl Barth's famous studies of this text.  Early next year a new collection will help to fill in this gap: Daniel Patte and Christine Kelly, eds., Greek Patristic and Eastern Orthodox Interpretations of Romans (Romans Through History & Culture) (T&T Clark/Continuum, 2012), 224pp.

About this book, the publisher says:

This collection of essays integrates scholarly and scriptural interpretations, Eastern Orthodox biblical scholarship, together with biblical interpretations throughout church history. Unlike the Western interpretations that read Romans in terms of theological anthropology, the Greek Fathers do not presuppose such a concept and therefore each of the articles in this volume invites Western scholars and students to re-read Paul's letter with new eyes: with a greater sensitivity to the nuances of the Greek text; with an openness to envision what Paul is saying from very different theological and hermeneutical perspectives; and with the awareness that the Greek Fathers addressed particular contextual issues of their time.

The publisher has also helpfully provides us a detailed table of contents: 

• Introduction/Vasile Mihoc, Facultatea de Teologie 'Andrei Saguna', Sibiu, Romania. 
• Basic Principles of Orthodox Biblical Hermeneutics as Rooted in the Greek Fathers' Interpretation/Daniel Patte, Vanderbilt University. 
• How the Essays in this Volume Complement Each Other/Matthew W. Bates, University of Notre Dame. 
• Prosopographic Exegesis and Narrative Logic: Paul, Origen, and Theodoret of Cyrus on Psalm 69:22-23/Steven DiMattei, University of Houston. 
• Adam, an Image of the Future Economy: Romans 5:14 in the Context of Irenaeus' Christological Exegesis of Genesis 1:26/Archbishop Demetrios [Trakatellis], Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. 
• "Being Transformed": Chrysostom's Exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans/Vasile Mihoc, Theological School Sibiu. 
• St. Paul and the Jews in John Chrysostom's Commentary on Romans 9-11/George Kalantzis, Wheaton College. 
• The Voice So Dear to Me: Themes From Romans in Theodore, Chrysostom, and Theodoret/Bruce Lowe, Macquarie University-Sydney. 
• What Does Proecho Really Echo in Romans 3.9? Re-evaluating Arethas & Photius' 9th-10th Century Greek Interpretations/Stelian Tofana, Babes Bolayi University. 
• The Interdependency between Destiny, Humankind and Creation According to Rom. 8:18-23: An Orthodox-Patristic Perspective/Conclusion/Daniel Patte, Vanderbilt University. 
• Some of the Theological/Hermeneutical, Contextual, and Analytical/Textual Choices Made by Greek Fathers and Eastern Orthodox Interpreters of Romans
• Biographies of contributors
• Indices

The Vatican and the Holodomor in Ukraine

Those of you in Rome or with easy access to it may be interested to know of a book launch on October 26th at 5:30pm* at the Centro Russia Ecumenica (Borgo Pio 141, Roma) of a new scholarly work by Athanasius McVay and Lubomyr Luciuk, The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine.

We will have this book expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, and also discussed on here later.



_____________________________________________
* Which I previously mistakenly mentioned as being on Sept. 26th

Dictionaries of Orthodoxy

Reference works about Eastern Christianity have increasingly appeared in the last decade. In 2001 we had the very useful Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity. Then last year we saw the appearance of The A to Z of the Orthodox Church (The A to Z Guide Series). 
This is, as I noted in my review in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, a useful volume, but it is simply a  reprinted and re-titled version of The Historical Dictionary of the Orthodox Church  first published in 1996. It is no.175 in the ongoing series of rather useful “A to  Z Guides” that  Scarecrow Press has been bringing out, including the recent A to Z of the Coptic Church.

The usefulness of this book, however, will be limited by the fact – obvious from reading various entries, as well as the introductory chronology – that most of this book was written in the very early 1990s as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The ecclesiological and ecumenical consequences of  that collapse, and its many subsequent developments, are not covered in this book, which also appeared just before an explosion of  new  publications  in Eastern Christian studies.  This book’s eighty-eight-page bibliography,   therefore, would now require considerable updating.

Dumitru Staniloae: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology

Earlier this year, in a long review of a fascinating new collection, I drew attention in particular to the work of Radu Bordeianu on Dumitru Staniloae, widely regarded as Romania's pre-eminent theologian of the twentieth century. Now the latter again occupies the former's attention in a welcome new book to be released later this year:

Radu Bordeianu, Dumitru Staniloae: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology (Ecclesiological Investigations) (T&T Clark/Continuum, 2011), 240pp.


  About this book, the publisher says: 

Widely considered the most important Orthodox theologian of the twentieth     century, Dumitru Staniloae (1903-1993) contributed significantly to an ecumenical understanding of these themes. Because of his isolation by the Romanian Communist regime, his work still awaits its merited reception, especially given its potential contribution towards Christian unity.

In Staniloae's understanding the Church is a communion in the image of the Trinity. Because there is a continuum of grace between the Trinity and the Church, the same relationships that exist among trinitarian persons are manifested in creation in general, and the Church in particular. In this way, the Trinity fills the world and the Church, determining their mode of existence. Intratrinitarian relationships are manifested in the relationships between humankind and non-human creation, the Church and the world, local and universal aspects of the Church, clergy and the people, and among various charisms.

We also have the table of contents:

Introduction
Part One - Ecumenical Ecclesiology
Chapter 1 - Open Sobornicity: Staniloae's Interaction with the West
Chapter 2 - Filled with the Trinity: The Relationship between the Trinity and the Church
Part Two - Filled With the Trinity
Chapter 3 - Adoptive Children of the Father: The Relationship between the Father and the Church Chapter 4 - Body of Christ: The Relationship between the Son and the Church
Chapter 5 - Filled with the Spirit: The Relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Church
Part Three - Communion Ecclesiology
Chapter 6 - Priesthood Toward Creation
Chapter 7 - The Priesthood of the Church: Communion between Clergy and the People
Chapter 8 - Locality and Universality: Eucharistic Ecclesiology
Conclusion
Bibliography

I greatly look forward to reading this, reviewing it for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, and discussing it on here--as well as interviewing the author in the weeks ahead. 

The Development of Christology

Many people today, alas, know little history, and even less Christian, specifically doctrinal, history. They are as a result often upset to hear of the vigorous debates--not to say fights--that embroiled many Christians between the third and eighth centuries especially. Along comes a new book surveying the development of Christological doctrine and challenging some of the assumptions about that development: 

Charles Talbert, The Development of Christology During the First Hundred Years: And Other Essays on Early Christian Christology (Brill, 2011, 200pp.).

About this book the publisher says:

Entering the debate about the development of Christology among Jesus' earliest followers, this volume critiques both the traditional evolutionary view that posited an elementary early Jewish Christology that developed in complexity as it was increasingly Hellenized and the more recent attempt to see a full-orbed Christology both as early and as Jewish, not Hellenistic, in its categories. It contends that during the first 100 years Jesus' followers employed four models from their milieu, Jewish and Greco-Roman, both to understand and to communicate their Christologies. These models were … read moreappropriated because they were appropriate vehicles for expressing the impact of Jesus on them, past, present, and future

Desert Fathers and Mothers

Interest in the Fathers, especially those of the deserts of Egypt, remains high. In the last decade more than a dozen books have appeared. Especially noteworthy are several volumes by John Chryssavgis, including In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; and Tim Vivian, ed., Becoming Fire: Through the Year with the Desert Fathers and Mothers.

Now another book has been released just last week: David G.R. Keller, Desert Banquet: A Year of Wisdom from the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Liturgical Press, 2011), 256pp.

About this book, the publisher says:

The wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers lies in their experiences of solitude, prayer, community life, work, and care for their neighbors. Their goal was transformation of their lives through openness to the presence and energy of God in Christ. They taught by example and by sharing narratives and sayings that reflect the deep human psychological and spiritual aspects of their journey toward authentic human life. The venue for their transformation was the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. They emphasized self-knowledge, humility, purity of heart, and love of God and neighbor. Far from being naïve, their sayings and narratives reflect honest struggles, temptations, and failures. They also demonstrate the disciplines of prayer and meditation that kept them centered in God as their only source of strength. The daily reflections in Desert Banquet introduce readers to a variety of these early Christian mentors and offer reflections on the significance of their wisdom for life in the twenty-first century.

The noted Orthodox theologian John McGuckin, whose work we have discussed on here several times, has praised Keller's book thus:

"This delightful book presents a year´s daily readings from the Early Christian Desert tradition, with a very helpful spiritual commentary for each date. It is a veritable pocket Philokalia, such as we hear about in The Way of the Pilgrim. Fr. David Keller has done a great service in providing this very profound source of lectio divina for those seriously interested in the spiritual path."

The Copts and the Muslims

Those of us who have spent 2011 very anxiously watching events unfold in Egypt cannot but have an increasingly sickening feeling that initial suspicions are being borne out and things are going from bad to worse for the Coptic Christians in that country.

Too many journalists, bloggers, and even would-be academics such as Walter Russell Mead cannot bother to bestir themselves to understand the situation of the Copts beyond mindlessly repeating demonstrably false and thoroughly discredited slanders, the grossest and most lamentably common of which is that, in the mid-seventh century, the Copts "welcomed" invasion by Arab Muslims, supposedly with open arms. Serious historians who know what they are talking about have shown this to be false--but to paraphrase Robert Taft at Orientale Lumen in June, why bother studying history when instead you can just make it up?

Most recently this absurd myth of Coptic welcoming of Muslim conquest has again been debunked by Sidney Griffth in his essay "The Syriac-Speaking Churches and the Muslims in the Medinan Era of Muhammad and the Four Caliphs," part of a collection edited by Dietmar Winkler and entitled Syriac Churches Encountering Islam: Past Experiences and Future Perspectives (Pro Oriente Studies in the Syriac Tradition). I have noted the contents of this book before and hope to have a long review of it posted in the weeks ahead.

Griffith, author of The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, in the above-noted essay shows that the idea of Coptic welcome of invasion stems from a notoriously misquoted and misunderstood letter from Isho'yabh III (d. 659), patriarch of the "Church of the East." When read in context, that letter, on "closer inspection reveals that the writers were not so much voicing a welcome for what we recognize in hindsight as the onset of the Islamic conquest as they were invidiously comparing even Arab rule, which they disdained, to the oppressive conduct of their previous governors....[T]he Christians of all denominations unanimously regarded the conquest as a disaster"(28; emphasis mine). May this pernicious fiction die the death it deserves. And more important, may the Copts soon obtain that freedom from persecution that they have for too long been denied.

Orthodoxy in the Spiritual Marketplace

Twice in as many years, I have heard lectures by Amy Slagle of the University of Southern Mississippi, and both were fascinating. Both were delivered in the context of the ASEC conference, which is really one of the most outstanding academic conferences I've attended, marked by a wonderful spirit of collegiality, thanks in no small part to the leadership of the lovely and delightful Jenn Spock, an historian of Russian monasticism teaching at Eastern Kentucky University under whom the Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture (ASEC) goes from strength to strength. At the most recent conference, held at Ohio State University (whose Hilandar Research Library and Resource Centre for Medieval Slavic Studies, under Dr. Predrag Matejic's leadership, really is an outstanding place) October 7-8, Slagle gave another paper on the role of Seraphim Rose in contemporary American Orthodoxy.

Slagle has just recently published her first book, based on her doctoral dissertation: The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity (Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 207pp.

This is a superlative study, and I warmly recommend it. I think that sociologists of religion, anthropologists studying religious communities, and of course Eastern Christians themselves, perhaps especially pastors and hierarchs looking to understand the mindset of many converts to Orthodoxy today, would benefit greatly from reading the only study of its kind in North America today.

One of the several happy aspects of this book is how wonderfully it is written. Slagle--unlike too many people trained in the methods of the modern social sciences--writes with great lucidity and cogency, eschewing the often jargon-laden, leaden, and lethal prose one so often finds in social-science journals and books. Slagle herself said to me that the book is a fast read, and indeed it is; but one should not allow the speed with which the pages turn to distract one from the many and significant insights she weaves into her analysis of the fascinating stories of the forty-eight converts to Orthodoxy whom she studied in different parts of the country and in different Orthodox churches. This is a ground-breaking book, and in its care to tell stories honestly and analyze them without imposing an ideological agenda, Slagle sets the bar high for future studies--and notes the need for such studies because hers has not, she is at pains to say, been "a complete, comprehensive, or generally representative portrait of  'the conversion experience' of American-born converts to Orthodox Christianity" (37).

After two introductory chapters--the first on Orthodoxy in general, the second on Eastern Orthodoxy in the context of late-modern North American pluralism--Slagle turns, in chapter three, to the diversity of practices used to receive converts into Orthodoxy, depending, inter alia, on whether they were baptized before or not; and if so, from which tradition they may be coming. There is, as John Erickson and others have noted, no consistent practice on how other Christians are received into Orthodoxy. Chapters 4-6 are the heart of the book, exploring the meaning and motivation of conversion, the perspectives of converts on Orthodox liturgics and ritual, and then the convert's perspective on the question of ethnicity in Orthodoxy.

One of the many fascinating insights Slagle uncovers through structured interviews with her subjects, and through participant-observation of Orthodox parish life, is that "even in their embrace of Orthodox tradition, converts retain generalized American assumptions that religion should promote interior growth, fulfillment, and psychological comfort" (15). Many of them come to embrace Orthodoxy through a quintessentially modern American method of  "church shopping" in which "church affiliation [is] more a matter of personal taste than an imperative to find the doctrinally true" (47). I was especially fascinated by Slagle showing that even for those converts for whom some notion of objective truth was ostensibly their motive for converting, a "subjective view of religion as a kind of handmaiden to the needs of the self was not easily shaken" (48). The paradoxes of modernity, and the The Triumph of the Therapeutic, are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to outwit. (In the memorable words of the late Richard John Neuhaus in his The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World, converts are often those who "exult in the freedom to submit to authority with wild abandon"!) This idea of "religion" as therapeutic, aimed towards my happiness, runs smack into "one of the most common informant responses to the question of difficulties they [coverts] had encountered in becoming or being Orthodox," namely fasting.

Slagle's chapter on ethnicity and converts is full of surprises (as are her findings of the differences in how converts by marriage are treated vs. converts who come as seekers from other traditions) on the part of the attitude both of the converts, and of the parishioners and clergy in their new-found communities. The stories of converts, and the reactions of priests and cradle members of parishes, are all told with Slagle's careful, unobtrusive, and very even-handed manner.

In her conclusion, Slagle notes that "these conversions defy simple characterizations" (157) and are often not the end of the story: "many converts...leave the Orthodox Church for other religious options" (161). Let us hope that Slagle will next turn her hand to exploring these converts who leave Orthodoxy, and their reasons for doing so, for that would make for another welcome book, as likely as fascinating and well-written as The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity.