The Universal Exaltation of the Life-Giving Cross

Today's feast, observed in East and West, celebrates the central paradox at the heart of Christianity: an instrument of torture and death is the instrument of everlasting life. As we commemorate this feast, I think especially of the role of the dowager empress Helena, who has been much on my mind after I have been re-reading (in preparation for a public lecture later this month) that absolutely wonderful
eponymous historical novel about her by Evelyn Waugh.

We are fortunate this year to have a new book about the sign of the cross from the hand of the young scholar Andreas Andreopoulos, author of previous works on iconography and art, who, his publisher tells us,

was born in Greece in 1966 and is recognized throughout the world as one of the most eloquent young scholars of Christianity. He earned his Ph.D. in theology at the University of Durham under Fr. Andrew Louth and has taught in Toronto, Montreal, and Philadelphia. He is currently Lecturer of Christian Theology at the University of Wales.

Andreas Andreopoulos, The Sign of the Cross: The Gesture, the Mystery, the History (Paraclete Press, 2011), 165pp. 

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Millions of Christians around the world use the sign of the Cross—and have done so for centuries—as a gesture of blessing. It is practiced when alone, during worship, before sleep, upon waking, before eating, before travel, and many other times throughout the day. But, what does it mean? Where did it originate? What did the sign of the Cross mean to the first Christians, and how has this simple movement of the hand evolved over the centuries?

The sign of the Cross is literally a tracing of the Cross of Christ onto the body. By so doing, Christians invite the mystery of the Cross into their everyday lives. Now and for the first time, young Greek scholar Andreas Andreopoulos explains the tremendous meaning, mystery, and history of this dramatic gesture shared by Christians worldwide. This readable account will fascinate and inspire all who desire to know more about the inherited spiritual practices of everyday life.

Muslim-Christian Relations

In the most recent issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the Antiochian Orthodox theologian Theodore Pulcini reviewed Mahmoud Ayoub's A Muslim View Of Christianity: Essays on Dialogue,

noting that the book is an extremely careful and thoughtful discussion of the deep theological differences between Christianity and Islam. The book pays special attention to Eastern Christians. Such dialogue between members of the two faiths, Pulcini argued in his review, is likely going to be ever more important as the twenty-first century continues to unfold.


One such recent effort to continue that dialogue comes in Waleed El-Ansary and David K. Linnan, eds., Muslim and Christian Understanding: Theory and Application of "A Common Word" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 300pp.

This book includes a a chapter on the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its role in Muslim-Christian dialogue written by John Chryssavgis.

The publisher further tells us that

This book explores “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a high-level ongoing Christian-Muslim dialogue process. The Common Word process was commenced by leading Islamic scholars and intellectuals as outreach in response to the Pope’s much criticized Regensburg address of 2007, and brings to the fore, in the interest of developing a meaningful peace, how the Islamic and Christian communities representing well over half of the world's population might agree on love of God and love of neighbor as common beliefs.

The Splendors of Old Cairo

Forthcoming from Oxford University Press is a new collection by Gadwat Gabra and edited by Carolyn Ludwig, with photographs from Sherif Sonbol and Morris Jackson, Stefan Reif, Tarek Swelim, Gertrude van Loon: The History and Religious Heritage of Old Cairo: Its Fortress, Churches, Synagogue, and Mosque (Oxford UP, 2011), 250pp + 250 illustrations.

This book, the publisher tells us, is:

A celebration of the history of religious life in the early Egyptian capital, in text and pictures.

Just to the south of modern Cairo stands the historic enclave known as Old Cairo, which grew up in and around the Roman fortress of Babylon, and which today hosts a unique collection of monuments that attest to the shared cultural heritage of ancient Egyptians, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

In this lavishly illustrated celebration of a very special place, renowned photographer Sherif Sonbol's remarkable images of the fortress, churches, synagogue, and mosque illuminate the living fabric of the ancient and medieval stones, while Gawdat Gabra describes the history of Old Cairo from the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Romans to the founding of the first Muslim city of al-Fustat. Stefan Reif focuses on the Jewish history of the area, exploring the famous Genizah documents found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue that tell so much about everyday life in medieval Egypt. Gertrud van Loon looks at the early Coptic Christian churches, some of the oldest in the world, and Tarek Swelim describes the arrival of the Muslims in the seventh century, their establishment of al-Fustat on the edge of Old Cairo, and the building of the Mosque of 'Amr ibn al-'As, the oldest mosque in Africa.

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

What Would Jesus Snort?

Controversies over images are neither new nor confined to Islam today. Christians and Jews have long had fierce debates over what images, if any, especially of hieratic realities, may legitimately be made and honored, and how. Iconoclasm is a problem beyond Byzantium. What makes an image an "icon" and how do we treat such icons? These and similar questions are taken up in a new book: Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon (Oxford UP, 2011), 352pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

How does an image become iconic? In Christ to Coke, eminent art historian Martin Kemp offers a highly original look at the main types of visual icons. Lavishly illustrated with 165 color images, this marvelous work illuminates eleven universally recognized images, both historical and contemporary, to see how they arose and how they continue to function in our culture.

Kemp begins with the stock image of Christ's face, the founding icon--literally, since he was the central subject of early Christian icons. Some of the icons that follow are general, like the cross, the lion, and the heart-shape (as in "I heart New York"). Some are specific, such as the Mona Lisa, Che Guevara, and the famous photograph of the napalmed girl in Vietnam. Other modern icons come from politics, such as the American flag (the "Stars and Stripes"), from business, led by the Coca-Cola bottle, and from science, most notably the double helix of DNA and Einstein's famous equation E=mc2.

The stories of these icons--researched using the skills of a leading visual historian--are told in a vivid and personal manner. Some are funny; some are deeply moving; some are highly improbable; some center on popular fame; others are based on the most profound ideas in science. The diversity is extraordinary. Show More Along the way, we encounter the often weird and wonderful ways that these images adapt to an astonishing variety of ways and contexts.

Informative, amusing, and surprising by turns, Christ to Coke will entertain and intrigue readers with the narratives that Martin Kemp skillfully weaves around these famous images.

Relics and Miracles

When I was a student, I remember a professor telling me a story, likely apocryphal and doubtless embellished, of why there are, in the Byzantine sanctoral, so many days (four, at least) devoted to finding various bits of John the Baptist--chiefly his chronically lost or "misplaced" head. The answer, it was said, lies in the rivalry of ancient monasteries to have relics of the Forerunner, and one way, apparently, for this to happen was for monks to visit a rival monastery with some or better relics and then to pilfer them away, often under a performance of piety: e.g., when going to kiss his finger-bone or some other appendage, certain monks would often not merely kiss but in fact suck up part or all of the bone in their mouth and thus smuggle it out of the monastery and back to their own place.

Relics are the focus of the latest translation of a book by Sergius Bulgakov. As I have noted before, we are seeing a revival in Bulgakov studies as the number of translations into English of his works continues apace, mostly from the hand of Boris Jakim (though T.A. Smith has also translated Bulgakov's book on angels) and the efforts of Eerdmans. Now another one has been set for release in October:  Relics and Miracles: Two Theological Essays (Eerdmans, 2011), 128pp.


About this book, the publisher tells us:

Esteemed translator Boris Jakim here presents for the first time in English two major theological essays by Sergius Bulgakov. In “Relics,” a 1918 response to Bolshevik desecration of the relics of Russian saints, Bulgakov develops a comprehensive theology of holy relics, connecting them with the Incarnation and showing their place in sacramental theology. In “Miracles” (1932) Bulgakov presents a Christological doctrine of the Gospel miracles, focusing on the question of how human activity relates to the works of Christ. Both works are suffused with Bulgakov’s faith in Christian resurrection — and with his signature “religious materialism,” in which the corporeal is illuminated by the spiritual and the earthly is transfigured into the heavenly.

Turkey, Armenia, and Genocide

The question of the Armenian genocide continues to haunt not merely historians and other scholars, but also the politics of Europe. The genocide remains a hugely controversial notion in Turkey, where the very discussion of it is actually a criminal offense. Turkey continues to deny responsibility for any wrong-doing. And yet Turkey is also interested in joining the European Union: the prospects of the latter happening are diminished while the former denial remains in place. This November sees another book set to review all these issues: Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: The American Genocide Trials (Berghahn, 2011), 372pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

Turkey’s bid to join the European Union has lent new urgency to the issue of the Armenian Genocide as differing interpretations of the genocide are proving to be a major reason for the delay of the ratification. This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and eye-witness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians. After a long and painstaking effort, the authors, one an Armenian, the other a Turk, generally recognized as the foremost experts on the Armenian Genocide, have prepared a new, authoritative translation and detailed analysis of the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman Government record of the Turkish Military Tribunals concerning the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I. The authors have compiled the first-known English-language documentation of the trial proceedings and situated them within their historical and legal context. These documents show that Wartime Cabinet ministers, Young Turk party leaders, and a number of other parties inculpated in these crimes were court-martialed by the Turkish Military Tribunals in the years immediately following World War I. Most were found guilty and received sentences ranging from prison with hard labor to death. In remarkable contrast to Nuremberg, the Turkish Military Tribunals prosecuted solely on the basis of existing Ottoman domestic penal codes. This substitution of a national for an international criminal court stands in history as a unique initiative of national self-condemnation. This compilation is significantly enhanced by an extensive analysis of the historical origins, political nature and legal implications of the criminal prosecution of the twentieth century’s first state-sponsored crime of genocide. For a better understanding of one of key controversies in Genocide Studies, this book is essential for historians, political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and policy makers. 

David Fagerberg on Edith Humphrey's Grand Entrance

I have received a book review from the liturgical scholar David Fagerberg of Notre Dame, himself the author of one of my favorite books in liturgical theology, which I ensure my students always read: Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? 

In his book, Fagerberg shows, inter alia, extensive familiarity with the great--many would say the greatest--Orthodox liturgical theologian of the last century, Alexander Schmemann.

I asked Fagerberg, at once equally at home in Western and Eastern liturgical sources, to review a new book by Edith Humphrey, a former Canadian Anglican who entered the Antiochian Orthodox Church recently. We will publish Fagerberg's review in Logos next spring.

As I noted previously, Humphrey has written a number of really excellent critical reviews for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies including of  Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions and also, more controversially, Eugene Rogers' After the Spirit.

She is also herself the author of a number of interesting books, to be discussed in more detail next week when we have an interview with her on here. I asked Fagerberg to review her most recent book, Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven (Brazos Press, 2011), 272pp.

The contents of Grand Entrance are as follows:

Introduction: The Crisis of Corporate Worship and the Life of the Church
1. "Teach Us to Pray": What Is Worship, and Where Does Corporate Worship Fit?

2. "Praise God in His Sanctuary": Worship as Entrance in the Old Testament

3. "In Spirit and in Truth": Entrance in the New Testament

4. "From You Comes . . . Praise": Traditional Liturgies of the East

5. "In the Great Congregation": Traditional Liturgies of the West

6. "Your Church Unsleeping": Expressions of Worship Today

7. "That Your Prayers Not Be Hindered": Avoiding Pitfalls in Corporate Worship

Conclusion: "To Sing Is a Lover's Thing"

Glossary

Index

Humphrey's "ecumenical" approach is an encouraging one, and puts me in mind of  a book I recently received: Anton Usher, Replenishing Ritual: Rediscovering the Place of Rituals in Western Christian Liturgy (Marquette UP, 2011), 277pp.  Usher shows some familiarity with noted Eastern liturgists and historians, including Robert Taft and Peter Galadza.

But back to Humphrey. Fagerberg's review of her book notes that one of Humphrey's major concerns is to rescue the very notion of corporate-communal worship from the individualistic culture of today, especially among some evangelicals. A related concern is justifying the use of very ancient forms and venerable traditions in Catholic and especially Orthodox worship. As he drolly puts it:

The answer to questions like why cannot we reverse the sequence of word and sacrament, or why we cannot revise the stations of the cross to align with the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals is simple: it is not done this way. Asking "what elements do you include in your worship?" is like asking "in our laboratory we make water with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom – what do you use?"

Author Interview: Veronica della Dora

Earlier this year, as I noted, a good deal of attention focused on Mt. Athos thanks in part to a 60 Minutes documentary. This appeared alongside a new book about the mount: Veronica della Dora, Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011), 336pp. 

This book carries some significant endorsements from leading scholars, including:

Alice-Mary Talbot:
This is an extraordinarily original and innovative book. Although at first it might seem strange for a female scholar to write a book about a place she can never visit, Dr. della Dora turns this challenge to her advantage by focusing on the Holy Mountain as an 'object of desire,' and analyzing how various perceptions of it were transmitted over the centuries to viewers and readers, most of whom themselves never set foot on Athos. The book is not intended to be the 'inside story' of Athos, from the point of view of the monks, but Athos as seen "from the outside."

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware: Among the many books written about the Holy Mountain, this is one of the most exciting and original. It uncovers an aspect of Athos hitherto little explored and makes a genuinely significant contribution to existing scholarship. Veronica della Dora is concerned not with the external history of the monastic peninsula but rather with the part that it has played over the centuries, and continues to play, in the imagination of monks, pilgrims and travelers. Beautifully written, scrupulously researched, fully illustrated, this is a visionary work, remarkable in its insight. 

I asked the author for an interview about her book, and here are her thoughts:

AD: Please tell us about your background:

VdD: I graduated from the University of Venice, Italy and continued my studies in the Geography Department of the University of California at Los Angeles. I received my PhD in 2005 and, after two years as a postdoctoral researcher by the same institution and at the Getty Research Institute, I moved back Europe to start my current appointment as Lecturer in Geographies of Knowledge at the University of Bristol.

I was baptized Orthodox Christian in the metochion (dependency) of the Athonite monastery of Docheiariou in Sochos-Lagkada (Greece) in 2001, before moving to the States.

AD: What about your own background led you to the writing of this book?

The path that led me to this book is both academic and spiritual. As a cultural and historical geographer I have always been interested in processes of place making and in the ways people perceive place and landscape. There is a basic distinction between these two concepts. Place we tend to associate to meaning, to personal experience, to emotions; landscape to aesthetic contemplation. We always look at it from a distance.

I first encountered Mount Athos as a landscape. I was about to finish college and not quite sure what to do with my life. I had decided to learn Greek for a change and attend to a summer school in Thessalonica. One weekend the boys were taken to Athos. We girls were offered a boat tour of the peninsula. The night before, we were given a slide show. Images of magnificent buildings and black-robed monks ‘living like centuries ago’ captured my imagination.

Our boat left Sithonia early in the morning. Athos’ dark cone slowly started to loom on the horizon. When we passed the last monastery, Docheiariou, I suddenly remembered I had once talked to a monk from there through amateur radio. ‘Hold on, how can a monk be on a ham radio?!’ I couldn’t quite match images of austere clerics reading ancient manuscripts with HF transceivers and antennas. I became intrigued.

I decided to put my Greek to practice and wrote him a letter—out of pure curiosity, nothing else. Months passed by. ‘Maybe monks are misogynist and don’t write to women’, I thought. But one day I found an envelope stamped with the double-headed Byzantine eagle in my mailbox. ‘Dear Veronica, I am sorry it took me so long to reply, but I was working in the mainland over the summer and just found your letter’. It turned out that he and a small group of fellow-monks were building a nunnery outside of Athos, a place where women could live Athonite liturgical life.

The guy must have felt for my broken Greek and offered help. ‘I am glad you are trying to learn Greek not only because it is my mother tongue, but because it is the language of the Gospels. As a monk, however, it is not appropriate for me to keep a correspondence with a woman unless you have spiritual interests. Do you?’ ‘I am agnostic and know nothing about Orthodoxy. But I want to learn’.

We started to correspond, first through letters, later by phone. I would ask him about his daily routine and his faith. With patience and fatherly care, he would listen to me, correct my mistakes, teach me new words, and introduce me to his world.

One year later I met him at the nunnery. He was excavating the foundations of a new building with other fathers under midday’s burning sun. A bunch of sweating, dust-covered bearded men dressed in rugs—definitely not the image of monk I had in mind!

I spent few days there. I attended a long vigil. I couldn’t pick up a single word, but the chanting kept echoing in my mind for entire months after my return home. I revealed to him anxieties and personal problems. He provided me with sound advice which I treasured over the years. I found a safe shelter. I regained my faith.

I also found that dozens of other laypeople turned to the monastery, usually broken, suffering people: poor families, mothers of drug-addicted teenagers, couples who had lost their only child, the terminally sick. To each of them the monks would provide comfort, prayer, sometimes even financial help. They would not ‘preach’, but live people’s daily sufferings from within. For all these laypeople Athos continues to be a beacon of light and hope. For me it has ironically become the most stable landmark in a life of continuous changes and moves. From landscape, it has become a place.

AD: Tell us why you wrote this book:

This book was originally written as my PhD dissertation. Like, I believe, any PhD student, I wanted to work on a topic about which I was truly passionate.

I originally moved to the States in 2001 as an exchange student between my former institution in Italy and UCLA. That was two months after my baptism and exactly three days before 9/11. For a 23-year-old who had never lived by herself, let alone abroad, it was no easy task being catapulted to the other end of the globe under such dramatic circumstances. I think this is when my tie with Mount Athos started to grow stronger and stronger. In the midst of daily difficulties and uncertainties, I knew the fathers would light a candle for me and this gave me strength. I liked to think that every night, as Europe was still asleep, the monks would get up to go to church and would pray for the entire world. Everyday I saw a little miracle happen and felt closer and closer to the Holy Mountain, even though I was so distant.

The year I was preparing for my ABD exams, the European parliament had just passed a resolution of fundamental rights in the EU calling the Greek government to lift Athos’s avaton. All the articles I came across in the newspapers and on the web talked about the exclusion of women from Athos; none of them talked about the social and spiritual role of the Holy Mountain in the lives of those thousands of men and women, like myself, unable to visit it. As an insider-outsider, I felt disturbed by the caricaturization of Athos and its inhabitants in the press as a monolithic exotic other cut out from the rest of the world. As a scholar, I became interested by the genealogy of these perceptions and representations. More generally, I became interested in the processes through which a place circulates outside of its physical boundaries. 

I guess I ultimately wanted to show that physical distance does not necessarily mean exclusion from a place, and conversely, physical access does not always mean inclusion. The stories of many western travelers of the past and their orientalist constructions of Athos seem to confirm the latter point.

Finally, I wanted to show the cultural complexity of the place. I found that most scholarly monographs and tourist guides tended to focus only on certain aspects of Athos, which is its Byzantine legacy and sacredness. As I started to dive in the archives, I discovered a plethora of other stories: pre-Christian stories, stories of war refugees, botanists, sociologists, military strategists, and women. Some of these stories have appeared in specialized studies in various languages; many others just lay forgotten on dusty library shelves. I thought that taking these stories out of the archives and grouping them in a single volume would add another dimension to current scholarship on the Holy Mountain.

AD: For whom was the book written—did you have a particular audience in mind?

When I set to write my dissertation proposal, the audience I had in mind was predominantly academic. As I moved on and came across so many exciting stories and images, however, I felt more and more compelled to write for a general public interested in Mount Athos. I thought it would be a shame to confine these materials to a specialized scholarly audience. When I rewrote the work for publication, I set this as my main task, by expunging academic jargon, for example, and trying to make the book accessible and pleasant to read also to a non-academic audience.

AD: Were there any surprises you discovered in your writing?

Yes, definitely. There were many surprises and I believe this the beauty of research: you set off with a set of research questions and expectations and end up with something totally different. For example, I had no idea Athos had been a geopolitical observatory or a refuge for WWII allied soldiers, or that late Byzantine scholars and western Renaissance mapmakers represented it as some sort of insular utopia.

Every account or image I encountered during my research was a surprise in itself. I found some stories bizarre, populated as they were by eccentric philhellenes who would normally lecture in togas, by voracious bibliomaniacs after Athos’ precious manuscripts, or by lunatic early-twentieth-century adventurers gaining a reputation for having crossed the Alps on elephant back. Other stories I found moving. For example, I could not hold back my tears while reading the autobiography of WWII Australian heroine and philanthropist Joice Nankivell Loch, who for many years inhabited the Byzantine tower of Ouranoupoli and, with her husband, helped rescue the village from famine. Like myself and many other women, Joice felt part of the Athonite community even though she could not physically cross the border.

AD: Are there similar books out there, and if so, how is yours different?

There are several excellent monographs on Mount Athos, including Graham Speake’s beautifully illustrated Renewal in Paradise.

I guess two things make Imagining Mount Athos unique, or at least sui generis: the first is my female authorship (and thus my positionality); the second is my approach as a cultural geographer. I am not so much interested in the factual history of the place (this has been already written), as in ways of seeing it and in the multiple narrative channels through which Mount Athos travelled outside of its boundaries throughout the centuries.

Since pre-Christian times, Athos has been usually narrated as an island. Today many still tend to forget it is a peninsula. It continues to silently stretch far beyond its boundaries, as it always did. A woman named Maria Lagoude wrote in the eleventh century:

From old and from the beginning, and so to speak, from the time I was in my mother’s womb I was raised by the monks of Lavra. During our entire life my husband and I have been devoted to the Lavra and have much faith in it because of the virtue of the fathers who live there and their compassionate soul-loving disposition... At the Holy Lavra my husband and I found a harbour of salvation (A.M. Talbot, ‘Women and Mt Athos’, in Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism, p.78).

As Alice-Mary Talbot commented, this woman envisaged the abbot of the monastery as ‘her spiritual father, the Lavra as her mother, and herself as one of the brethren and children of the Lavra’—a place she never saw, even from the boat.

Canonical Territory

It is fascinating to read that other Orthodox hierarchs have finally come around to challenging the Russian Church over its (shall we say) sui generis understanding of the canons of the Ecumenical Councils. Though the English in this piece is somewhat tortured in places, the import of it is not:

“Due to the events which have recently taken place in the Orthodox Church,” the Council stressed the necessity that the Orthodox Churches should respect and strictly observe the geographical borders of their jurisdictions “as defined by the holy canons and Tomoses on the foundation of these Churches.” 

In addition, it is heartening to see the Ecumenical Patriarchate stating clearly that

the Constantinople Patriarchate stated in the Tomos on the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in Poland issued in 1924 that it never legally renounced its jurisdiction over the Kyivan Metropolitanate. As for the whole Moscow Patriarchate and its canonical borders, the Constantinople Council observes the Thomos of 1589 according to which the territory of the present-day Ukraine is not part of the Moscow Patriarchate.

This takes us into some very complicated history, much of which is very clearly sorted out in Borys Gudziak's superlative study, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2001), 512pp. One should also see the collection of articles edited by B. Groen, Four Hundred Years Union of Brest (1596-1996) A Critical Re-Evaluation (Peeters, 1998), 269pp. 

I follow these seemingly recondite debates with great interest and have for five years been working on an article on the notions of canonical territory, which I was able to treat only very briefly in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Much nonsense is talked when this phrase about "canonical territory" is invoked. One of the few decent studies I have seen is Johannes Oeldemann, "The Concept of Canonical Territory in the Russian Orthodox Church," in the collection edited by Thomas Bremer, Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths (Studies in Central and Eastern Europe).

"Canonical territory" is a nice theory, but nobody lives it today, as Robert Taft acidly observed both in his famous interview with John Allen in 2004 and more recently and with an abundance of historical documentation in his lecture in June at Orientale Lumen. These are problems afflicting not merely Orthodoxy, but also the Roman Catholic Church and, since at least 2003, the Anglican Communion. I'm giving a lecture on these notions in a few weeks and that prospect, together with encouraging discussions with Taft and Met. Kallistos Ware at Orientale Lumen in June, has encouraged me to return to that article I started five years ago. Several interesting developments have since taken place in the last half-decade, including the erection of Anglican ordinariates on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, and the so-called Chambésy process in the Orthodox world. Both of these developments suggest to me that the Roman and Eastern Churches might finally be getting serious about "canonical territory." We shall see.

Byzanz in Europa. Europas östliches Erbe

Forthcoming from Brepols is a bilingual (German-English) collection: M. Altripp, ed., Byzanz in Europa. Europas östliches Erbe: Akten des Kolloquiums 'Byzanz in Europa' vom 11. bis 15. Dezember 2007 in Greifswald, ed. M. Altripp (Brepols, 2011), c. 550pp + 79 b/w ill.

About this collection the publisher tells us:

The role of Byzantium in the Middle Ages is comparable to that of a modern political superpower such as the United States. The latter has a pervasive cultural impact on Europe and Asia, and similar cross-cultural relationships between East and West were also evident in medieval Europe, when Byzantine literature, music, art, and ritual were not only known but also studied and appropriated throughout the West. Scholarship on Byzantium and its relationship with Western Europe has yet to explore the full dynamics of this relationship or the extent to which the West was influenced by Byzantine culture. The papers presented in this volume offer a wide interdisciplinary perspective on the crucial importance of Byzantium for Western Europe, featuring articles on art and architectural history, social and religious history, musicology, literature, historiography, gender studies. The essays originate from an interdisciplinary conference, held in the Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald in December 2007, which brought together an international group of scholars. The proceedings of this gathering give a new and compelling testimony to the exceptionally high status of Byzantine culture in Western Europe and invite further studies on the exceptional and unique role of the Byzantine Empire, positioned at the crux between Europe and Asia.

A very lengthy and detailed table of contents of the book may be seen here.

Ottoman Genocides

The Armenian genocide continues to generate scholarly attention, often in an increasingly wider context of other genocides, then and since. Now a new book from Oxford continues to expand our understanding:  R.G. Suny et al, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (OUP, 2011), 448pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian Genocide remains a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and the deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here the most accurate reconstruction of what happened and why. This book is the product of a decade of scholarly encounters that launched intense investigations by historians and other social scientists dedicated to honest exploration of one of history's greatest tragedies.
While the word "genocide" still divides communities, there is no longer any serious doubt that the Young Turk government ordered and carried out in 1915-1916 mass deportations and massacres targeted toward designated ethnoreligious groups. This volume includes reviews of the historical debates surrounding these events, portraits of the perpetrators, detailed accounts of the massacres themselves, and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then on what might happen now. Here history is not only the stories that we tell about the past but the foundation on which might be built new understandings of the present and possible futures.

Silence, Blasphemy, and Apostasy

The problems of what to do with those who abandon a religious tradition, and those who speak harshly and--to the minds of some, blasphemously--against the divine have been met with a variety of responses depending on the tradition in question and its surrounding sociopolitical context. Until recently many common-law countries had laws against blasphemy--just as we had laws against  pornography, adultery, sodomy, and many other things no longer criminalized today. Whether we should have abandoned those laws or not is open to debate. Certainly Christians are not of one mind as to whether that which is sinful should also ipso facto be criminal. Most Christians today, it seems, would rather strongly prefer not to criminalize speech even when it is defamatory of Christians themselves, or sacrilegious or blasphemous. 

Islam has often taken a different approach (though one must note that St. John of Damascus was scathing in some of his comments about Islam, and left unmolested by Muslims in Syria for his views) as, e.g., the journalist Hrant Dink, filmmaker Theo van Gogh and politician Ayan Hirsi Ali all know to their peril.

For their part, Eastern Christians have long and often bloody experience with what may or may not be said about Islam by Christians living under its suzerainty. A forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, to be released in October, shows that these issues are alive and well today, and have spread beyond traditional eastern homelands: Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide (OUP, 2011), 544pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us that it contains:               

• The first world survey of the range and effects of blasphemy and apostasy charges

• Foreword by the late Abdurrahman Wahid, former President of Indonesia and head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest Muslim organization, as well as short chapters on religious freedom within Islam by noted scholars Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd and Abdullah Saeed

• Multiple detailed case studies of Muslims and others who have faced blasphemy charges

The fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the 2005 Danish cartoon fracas awakened many people to the potency of blasphemy accusations in the Muslim world. Accusations and charges such as "blasphemy," "apostasy," "insulting Islam," or "hurting Muslims' religious feelings" pose a far greater danger than censorship of irreverent caricatures of Mohammad: they are increasingly used as key tools by authoritarian governments and extremist forces in the Muslim world to acquire and consolidate power. These charges, which draw on disputed interpretations of Islamic law and carry a traditional punishment of death, have proved effective in crushing or intimidating not only converts and heterodox groups, but also political and religious reformers. In fact, one reason for the recent growth of more repressive forms of Islam is their use of accusations of blasphemy, apostasy, and related charges to intimidate and silence their religious opponents and make any criticism of their own actions and ideas religiously suspect. The effect of such laws thus goes far beyond what might narrowly be called religious matters.

This volume provides the first world survey of the range and effects of apostasy and blasphemy accusations in the contemporary Muslim world, in international organizations, and in the West. The authors argue that we need to understand the context, history, impact, and mechanics of the blasphemy phenomenon in modern Muslim societies and guidance on how to effectively respond. The book covers the persecution of Muslims who convert to another religion or decide that they have become agnostic or atheists, as well as 'heretics:' those who are accused of claiming a prophet after Mohammed, such as Baha'is and Ahmadis. It also documents the political effects in Muslim societies of blasphemy and apostasy laws, as well as non-governmental fatwas and vigilante violence. It describes the cases of hundreds of victims, including political dissidents, religious reformers, journalists, writers, artists, movie makers, and religious minorities throughout the Muslim world. Finally, it addresses the legal evolution toward new blasphemy laws in the West; the increasing use of laws on "toleration" in the West, which may become surrogate blasphemy laws; increasing pressure by Muslim governments to make Western countries and international organizations enforce laws to restrict speech; and the increasing use of violence to stifle expression in the West even in the absence of law. Its foreword is by Indonesia's late President Abdurrahman Wahid.  

In addition to this, another recent book treats of the question of blasphemy in a Christian context: David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Oxford UP, 2010), 286pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Tracing the subject from the Middle Ages to the present, David Nash outlines the history of blasphemy as a concept - from a species of heresy to modern understandings of it as a crime against the sacred and individual religious identity. Investigating its appearance in speech, literature, popular publishing and the cinema, he disinters the likely motives and agendas of blasphemers themselves, as well as offering a glimpse of blasphemy's victims. In particular, he seeks to understand why this seemingly medieval offence has reappeared to become a distinctly modern presence in the West.

                         

Congar's Ecclesiology

If you read my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity
as all right-thinking people will want to and will encourage their friends to do, you will discover my indebtedness in there to people like Yves Congar, especially to his True and False Reform in the Church, which only this year finally appeared in English; it has been in French since 1950 but somehow neglected. In Vraie et Fausse Reforme dans lÉglise, Congar writes of his "grande loi" of Catholic reform, which was a guiding method in my exploration of the papacy. Congar was a hugely important figure in not merely Catholic, but also Orthodox and Protestant theology, especially ecclesiology, from World War II onward. Congar was author of many important books, both influenced by and influential upon Orthodox theology, beginning with his After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism Between the Eastern and Western Churches and going on to include The Meaning of Tradition, I Believe in the Holy Spirit,  and Tradition and Traditions: The Biblical, Historical, and Theological Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition. In addition, his diaries of World War I as well as his Journaux d'un théologien, 1946-1956 and his still more famous Mon journal du Concile, coffret de 2 livres show the costs of pushing for Christian unity in a time when the Catholic Church had tied herself into knots with the soteriological exclusivism of Mortalium Animos.  

There has been something of a recent revival in Congar studies, led in the last 18 months by small volumes such as Yves Congar: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters) as well as a new collection of essays by Congar, At the Heart of Christian Worship: Liturgical Essays of Yves Congar . In addition, Douglas Koskela's study Ecclesiality and Ecumenism: Yves Congar and the Road to Unity should be read by Eastern and Western Christians as a welcome contribution to that topic.

Later this month, we will have another publication devoted to Congar's ecclesiology: Anthony Oelrich, A Church Fully Engaged: Yves Congar's Vision of Ecclesial Authority (Liturgical Press, 2011), 176pp. 

About this book the publisher says:

The French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, was deeply convinced that in the church’s ongoing tension with the secular world “it was led to adopt very much the same attitudes as the temporal power itself, to conceive of itself as a society, as a power, when in reality it was a communion, with ministers and servants.” It was Congar’s lifelong theological project to help restore to the church a more evangelical, gospel-based understanding of her life. From the vast corpus of this great expert of the Second Vatican Council, this book gathers his efforts as they pertain specifically to the issue of authority in the church. The often hot-button nature of any discussion on how authority is exercised in the church will only benefit from the retrieval of the theological tradition on this issue brought forth by Congar. Congar’s vision ultimately demands that our understanding of authority must flow from our understanding of God as a Trinity of Persons and, therefore, be practiced in the mutuality of relationship and always be directed at growth in authentic relationship.

The Brilliant and Tragic Life of Pavel Florensky

In the upcoming fall issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, we have an article discussing the life and significance of Pavel Florensky, still only moderately understood in the Christian East, and barely in the West.

Florensky has hitherto been studied by only a few in the West, most significantly Robert Slesinski in his Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. Many of Florensky's works remain untranslated, though we do have in English his landmark books The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters as well as Iconostasis and Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art.

Last year, Avril Pyman and Geoffrey Hosking published what looks to be the most important study of Florensky in a quarter-century:  Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia's Unknown da Vinci (Continuum Books, 2010), 328pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius is the first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. He has been compared to Pascal, Teilhard de Chardin, even da Vinci. Florensky was, at one and the same time, a supremely gifted philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer and theologian. He was also a poet and wrote studies of history, language and art. Although he taught philosophy for most of his working life, his interests were wide-ranging and profound and included the study of time and space, theoretical and applied physics, aspects of language, and the properties of materials and geology. His book The Pillar and the Ground of Truth is widely seen as a masterpiece of Russian Orthodox theology. Avril Pyman looks at Florensky’s life, from his childhood as the son of a railroad engineer to his mysterious death, and provides a populist perspective on his achievements. Her book celebrates the life of a little-known twentieth century Christian genius.

We will have this book expertly reviewed for Logos in 2012.