Will Cohen on Sister Churches

I was delighted to see the appearance of my friend Will Cohen's new book, The Concept of "Sister Churches" in Catholic-Orthodox Relations since Vatican II. He truly is a gentleman and a scholar, and I'm glad to see this important book in print since it offers vital clarifications to both Catholics and Orthodox alike. I sent him some questions for an interview about this book, and here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background

WTC: I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis in a secular Jewish family, studied literature and political science at Brown and lived in New York after college, where in my late twenties I underwent a religious conversion.  Some of the works of Kierkegaard played a key role, but things culminated when I was preparing to teach English at a prep school in northern New Jersey and read Genesis, Exodus, and Matthew’s Gospel for the first time.  After that I began attending a Lutheran (ELCA) Church on the Upper West Side and was baptized.

Within a couple of years, I felt the need of a stiffer drink, so to speak, and wound up in an Anglican Catholic context through a former professor of mine whose husband was a bishop in that communion.  He invited me to study for holy orders and would have sent me to an Anglican Catholic seminary, but as it had recently closed and he had a high regard for Orthodoxy and St. Vladimir’s Seminary, I ended up going there.  I lived and worshipped at St. Vladimir’s for three years as an Anglican Catholic, with no end of ecclesiological questions on my mind from the day I set foot on campus to the day I graduated.

That summer I married my wife, Julie, with ordination plans on hold, and two years later, when I started a doctoral program at Catholic U. in Washington, DC, we entered the Orthodox Church.  After finishing at Catholic U., I joined the Theology and Religious Studies department at the University of Scranton where I have been teaching theology since 2009. We live in Scranton’s Hill Section with our three children Ella, Matthew, and Jonathan.  

AD: What led you to write this book?

WTC: From the beginning of my encounter with Orthodoxy, I have wondered about the nature and depth of the divisions between the Orthodox Church and other Christian communions.  First I wondered if Orthodoxy and Anglo-Catholicism were really so different; then I wrote my Master’s thesis on the division between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox families of churches.  But inevitably I became interested in the relationship between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  In a doctoral seminar paper, I had a little section on the phrase “sister churches”, and Fr. Joseph Komonchak, who taught the seminar, said almost in passing that I might consider doing a dissertation on that topic.

I did some research and proposed the idea to Fr. (now Msgr.) Paul McPartlan, my natural choice to direct my dissertation because of his extensive work in ecumenism and sympathetic knowledge of Orthodoxy, and he had some initial and quite reasonable reservations – he worried that the topic might be too diffuse.  However, he agreed, something he perhaps came partly to regret given how much time he wound up devoting to the project to keep it humming along!  The dissertation on sister churches, at any rate, turned into the book Aschendorff has just published, thanks to the interest that Barbara Hallensleben, editor of the Studia Oecumenica Friburgensia monograph series, took in it when she heard of its existence from Fr. John Erickson, my former teacher at St. Vladimir’s and a writer on ecclesiological topics from whom I have learned a great deal.

AD: You secured prefaces from two venerable and important figures. Tell us a bit about that process and why their voices matter.

WTC: Dr. Hallensleben surprised me when she told me she was going to ask Cardinal Kurt Koch to write a preface; I was further surprised when she said he had agreed, though I shouldn’t have been, since she commands such respect and is very persuasive!  I did not communicate with Cardinal Koch directly, though I am very grateful to him for the time he gave to reading and commenting on the book given his immense responsibilities. The focus of the book being what it is – Catholic-Orthodox dialogue – it was obviously of great importance to have a Catholic as well as an Orthodox endorsement if possible, and short of the pope I suppose, there could be no one whose voice resounds with more significance in global Catholicism, and in ecumenical circles generally, than Cardinal Koch.

Ironically perhaps, the preface from Metropolitan Kallistos was the one I had a harder time securing. At a meeting of the Orthodox Theological Society in America (OTSA) in summer 2015, where Metropolitan Kallistos had given the keynote address, I got word that there was need for someone to take His Eminence to dinner.  The other officers all had planes to catch, and the responsibility fell to me.  As I sat across from Met. Kallistos during the meal, I gathered my courage and told him I felt I had a certain responsibility given that Providence had brought me to be sitting there with him to ask if he would be willing to read a book I had written on Catholic-Orthodox relations and consider writing a preface for it.  He said I should send him the manuscript, which I did, but from a friend close to him I heard that His Eminence was just too swamped.  He and my friend recommended another Orthodox scholar to approach.  But that scholar couldn't do it either, and for reasons that were so complicated that Met. Kallistos, hearing of it, somehow felt sorry and agreed to write at least a dust-jacket blurb based on selections of the book I had specified he might read.  However, once he started, he didn't stop, he later told me, but read the book straight through and went ahead and wrote a proper preface after all.  I think this was because the topics the book deals with are very close to his heart.  

AD: Ecclesiology and ecumenism were both much controverted at Vatican II, and of course at the recently concluded Gt. and Holy Synod in Crete. I've noted some thoughts on that council elsewhere, but wanted to know what your thoughts were on that council? 

Among the many important emphases of Vatican II, the notion of degrees of unity and communion was certainly one of the most fruitful.  It managed to avoid two ecclesiological dangers -- on the one hand a relativism that makes no distinction between lesser and greater degrees of real unity, and on the other a facile triumphalism that sees unity as simply all or nothing.  According to Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio, the Church of Christ is truly present and operative outside the Catholic Church, yet not fully -- this is the paradox that the Council's phrase "subsists in" sought to express. Exactly what it means for a communion to be truly but not fully church, as Vatican II said of the Orthodox communion, obviously requires a lot of unpacking.  But as a starting point for reflection it is a very promising and dynamic way of construing the Great Schism -- as having terribly damaged, but not altogether destroyed, relations among the local churches of East and West.

A vocal contingent within Orthodoxy has wished to draw from the doctrine of the oneness of the Church the conclusion that there can be no reciprocal or mutual relations of ecclesial significance between the Orthodox Church and any other, including the Catholic Church.  There were analogous Roman Catholic ecclesiological hardliners at Vatican II, of course, whose unsubtle vision lost out to the more profound and paradoxical vision that Vatican II finally promulgated.

At the Orthodox Council in Crete this past June, a battle was waged over the word "church" and whether it can be applied by the Orthodox to non-Orthodox communions.  His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, among others, refused to relinquish this term, and the official text on "Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World" retains it in reference to non-Orthodox.  In fact, Orthodox tradition is replete with instances in which other, separated communions are named "churches" -- the term is applied to non-Orthodox bodies in all kinds of writings by Orthodox theologians and official ecclesiastical texts -- so the hardliners who were wanting to get rid of the term would have been innovating, quite remarkably, had they gotten their way. It's unfortunate that they have managed to convince many of their followers that denying all ecclesial reality to every communion outside of Orthodoxy is somehow the traditional thing. I'm hopeful, though, that the authority of the recent council can serve as a bulwark against their misguided efforts.  

AD: You note at the outset that the term "sister churches" came roaring onto the scene in the early 60s, and enjoyed prominent and frequent usage until the turn of the century when it seems to have, as Waclaw Hryniewicz put it, to have fallen into disgrace. What led to such a fate?

On the Catholic side, there were some pendulum swings going on.  What Catholic advocates of the term "sister churches" were saying in the 60s and 70s was the Catholic Church should be able to affirm the ecclesial reality and value of the Orthodox Church even though the latter exists outside of full communion with the bishop of Rome. This was a needed corrective of an earlier Catholic ecclesiology that had generally confined itself to designating the Orthodox as schismatics, and had closed itself off in some measure from the rich inheritance of the Eastern Christian tradition.  As part of the same trajectory, "sister churches" advocates spoke of the importance of the local church, in order that a more conciliar, less centralized ecclesiological vision might be rediscovered in Catholicism.

Then in the 80s and 90s, there was some push-back from more conservative Catholic ecclesiologists who worried that Catholic advocates of "sister churches" language and conciliarity were losing sight of the significance of Roman primacy and were making the universal church secondary to the local. In pushing back, these conservative Catholic ecclesiologists -- Adriano Garuti was the most influential -- pushed too far, in my view, and seemed merely to revert to the earlier imbalance that "sister churches" advocates had wanted to redress.  Garuti even wished to question in what sense the Orthodox could really be called "church", and hence "sister church".

But he and others like him were correct, I believe, in at least reintroducing the principle of primacy as one of essential ecclesiological importance.  Some of Garuti's less than balanced vision found its way into the "Note on the Expression 'Sister Churches'" issued by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 2000 -- after which official Catholic usage of the term "sister churches" virtually disappeared -- but in general, documents of the CDF have resolutely affirmed the true ecclesial reality of Orthodoxy. Today, I think it is possible to hold primacy and conciliarity together, the unicity of the church and the reality of "sister churches".  Pope Francis has used the expression "sister churches" again in relation to the Orthodox, and so have other Catholic officials.

In the Orthodox world, the situation has been different.  On an official level, the term has never fallen out of favor.  We should recall that historically and traditionally, Orthodox have always wanted Rome to be and behave as a sister church, rather than only the mater et magistra of all the others, and that Rome's coming to be able to learn and receive from others in reciprocal relationship in the course of the 20th century -- as reflected in such a text as Orientale Lumen by John Paul II, but also in Rome's very willingness to speak of herself as a sister church -- has been reason to rejoice from a traditional Orthodox point of view.  However, reactionary Orthodox hardliners, losing sight of all this, have merely expressed outrage that Orthodox officials would ever use the term "church" to speak of the "papist heretics," etc.  These are the same people who object to the text promulgated at the Council in Crete because it affirms Orthodoxy's ecumenical involvement and the use of the word "church" to speak of non-Orthodox.
 
AD: You argue that the term needs to continue to be used so as to avoid "certain ecclesiological imbalances" towards which both Catholicism and Orthodoxy each incline in different ways. Unpack that phrase a bit for us--which imbalances?

The imbalance to which Catholic ecclesiology is prone is toward what Hermann Pottmeyer has aptly described as a "two-tiered" ecclesiology rather than a "three-tiered".  In a two-tiered ecclesiology, the only churches of which one ever speaks are the universal church and the local church (i.e. the diocese) -- there is nothing of any ecclesial significance in between. Hence there is only the pope and all the bishops as representatives of their local dioceses.

In a three-tiered ecclesiology, though, there are also regional structures of authority, e.g. patriarchates. As Pottmeyer and others, such as Hervé Legrand, have pointed out, the latter ecclesiology is much more in accord with Orthodoxy.  In fact the expression "sister churches" as it has been used over the centuries in the Christian East has almost always referred to relations among or between patriarchal churches. So in one of its most important and characteristic meanings, the phrase "sister churches" might help Catholic ecclesiology retrieve the middle tier, the patriarchal structure.  This of course is something you have eloquently advocated for in your own book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy.

But as Pottmeyer and many others have also observed, Orthodoxy, in the second millennium, has also been prone to a two-tiered ecclesiology, only with the missing tier in Orthodoxy's case being the one at the top that could serve as a locus of unity for all the patriarchates. We have seen what a struggle there continues to be in Orthodoxy over this question of a universal primate in the efforts to convene the global council that has just taken place and in the ongoing questions about its legitimacy and authority given the absence at Crete of some of the patriarchal or autocephalous churches.  The most perceptive and historically attuned Orthodox theologians have, I believe, always recognized the legitimate place of primacy -- not just at the local and patriarchal levels but also at the universal level in the life of the Church.

Yet the arch-opponents of the use of "sister church" language by Orthodox to refer to Rome object to its usage in this way because they believe that Rome can never be understood by Orthodox to be church at all until Rome gives up her "pretensions" to universal primacy.  So they see authentic "sister churches" as antithetical to Roman primacy.  This is not, as I've been saying, a monolithic Orthodox view -- Metropolitan John Zizioulas and others argue strongly against it -- but it is a powerful temptation in Orthodox ecclesiology.  At any rate, Orthodox recognition of Rome as a "sister church" is indirectly, I would say, a recognition that Rome's self-understanding of her own primacy is not all wrong and all bad, as Orthodox opponents of "sister churches" language applied to Rome believe that it is.

AD: You also note that in a situation where Orthodoxy and Catholicism are not in full communion the term "sister churches" has a certain "paradoxical character" which cannot be maintained indefinitely. Tell us a bit more about what you meant by that.

Sister churches are meant to be in full sacramental communion. Something I try to get at in my book is that the East-West schism wasn't so much something that happened as something that was and still is in process of happening, so that how we think about it and act in regard to it today contributes to the historically unfolding meaning of what the schism will finally have turned out to be:  perhaps, in the end, a full break between what were once two portions of the one undivided church, but perhaps, instead, a temporary and less than complete break between two portions whose communion and unity, although long obscured, was never totally lost after all.

When I suggest in the book that Orthodox and Catholic churches can't comfortably go on and on calling each other sister churches forever, what I mean is that they can't do that unless there is a dynamic movement toward unity in truth and love, which would culminate in full sacramental unity.  The ongoing schism is what makes "sister churches" between Catholics and Orthodox paradoxical.  But the less than complete nature of that ongoing schism, and in fact the possibility and real hope of its healing, is what makes "sister churches" between them meaningful.  Still, it will retain a certain paradoxical character until the moment when unity is reestablished on a sound, true basis.    

AD: Your fifth chapter quotes Orthodox voices critical of the term "sister churches." Those criticisms seemed to pick up steam this year surrounding the council on Crete. Is there a central concern or principle to these criticisms or are they largely motivated by fear of the other?

I believe that critics of the term have been troubled by legitimate concerns. Metropolitan Kallistos, in the preface to my book, acknowledges his own hesitancy to use "sister churches" to speak of relations between Orthodox and non-Orthodox.  The principle at stake is the unity of the Church.  However, I try to show that divisions between parties or local churches have broken out at any number of times in history and then been overcome, without either side being seen in retrospect as having ceased, during the temporary separation, to be church.  Right now, the Patriarchate of Antioch is not in communion with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.  Is one or the other of these Patriarchates necessarily no longer church?  Or is it that we anticipate that their being in less than full communion today will prove to have been a temporary matter.  With regard to the Great Schism, a thousand years is a longer stretch of time, no question, but perhaps the principle is still not essentially different:  one can choose whether to see a given separation, of however long, as either an irreversible fait accompli or as still susceptible to healing.

AD: As you know, the Catholic world has just come through an extended period of commemorating the 50th anniversary of Vatican II, which did so much to advance not just the concept of "sister churches" but also to deepen Orthodox-Catholic relations. Over the next half-century, what work remains to be done in your estimation so that these sisters can indeed be one around the Lord's table?

WTC: We started hearing some years ago that we had entered an "ecumenical winter", and it's true that by the 80s and 90s some of the early hopes of the post-conciliar era had faded.  But there are many hopeful signs today with regard to Catholic-Orthodox relations.  One of them that stands out to me is that increasing numbers of serious, ecclesially grounded Orthodox scholars are interested in overcoming a defensive anti-Western mentality and are confident enough in their Orthodox faith that they can affirm, more freely than many Orthodox theologians of a generation or two ago, whatever is true, honorable, right, pure, and lovely in the writings and witness of non-Orthodox Christians, perhaps especially Catholics.

More can be done, I think, to tell the story of how the Catholic Church came in the course of the twentieth century to open itself courageously and humbly to the gifts of the Christian East, and thereby to encourage the Orthodox Church also to adopt an increasingly receptive posture, which is always marked by discernment.  The Orthodox still doubt whether it is possible to learn and receive from the Catholic West without losing themselves and their authentic faith, without falling into a "western captivity," but this is slowly changing.    



AD: Sum up your hopes for the book and tell us who especially would benefit from reading it.

I like how Metropolitan Kallistos puts it in his preface when, after quoting Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras who said that the "miracle of reunion" between Catholics and Orthodox would be a miracle within history, His Eminence suggests that "[o]ur task is to remove the human obstacles that hinder the working of this divine miracle."  I hope that my book will be among those that truly help clear away the kinds of misconceptions that have hindered progress toward the miracle of the schism's genuine healing.

As to the question of readership, ecclesiologists and participants in ecumenical dialogue will probably be most apt to find the book's material directly relevant to their own work.  But with globalism and pluralism being such prevalent features of today's world, virtually every thinking Christian is effectively involved in ecumenical dialogue in some sense, merely by virtue of being frequently in contact with Christians of communions separated from his or her own.  When professing belief in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, it must occur to him or her that there is a question of what this means in view of the divisions among churches.  Anyone who has wondered about such a basic question as this might find the book to be of interest.    

AD: Having finished the book, what projects are you at work on now?

I am plugging away at another monograph, with the working title of Communion in an Age of Controversy.  It explores how the church throughout her history has perennially confronted new questions and undergone a process of discernment to make up her mind about them in light of what she has already had revealed to her.  The basic thesis is that a church that already has all the answers, that can never find herself in a condition of not knowing, is not a church alive in history.  Truth is temporal, takes time.  I look at ancient controversies like Arianism and iconoclasm as examples of this.  But the corollary of the thesis is that a church that only has questions, none of which she can ever definitively answer, not even at a ripe moment and after immense reflection and dialogue, is a merely human church and incapable of that unity in faith that is given by God.  So part of what I'm trying to do in the book is to meditate on the trouble we can get into both when we deny the real questions that arise in the life of communion and when we deny the authentic answers to them that do come -- not easily or quickly, but in time.  

Lying on the Couch of Unknowing: Apophatic Psychoanalysis (I)

I recently came across Adam Phillips, a literary scholar in England who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, the two disciplines being very often intertwined in his many books.

I picked up a copy of his recent book, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life and have read it with great interest. As I will show in the coming series, there is a very great deal here that could be of benefit to Christians in their spiritual life; and there is a good bit of material here that could be "methodologically" useful to the practice of theology.

The publisher tells us the following about this book:

A transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are. 

All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is an inescapable presence, a shadow at our heels. And this itself can become the story of our lives: an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of what we have in ourselves to be or to do. And this can make of our lives a perpetual game of falling short.

But what happens if we remove the idea of failure from the equation? With his flair for graceful paradox, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that if we accept frustration as a way of outlining what we really want, satisfaction suddenly becomes possible. To crave a life without frustration is to crave a life without the potential to identify and accomplish our desires.

In Missing Out, an elegant, compassionate, and absorbing book, Phillips draws deeply on his own clinical experience as well as on the works of Shakespeare and Freud, of D. W. Winnicott and William James, to suggest that frustration, not getting it, and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives―and may be essential to the one fully lived.

It is the sort of book one needs to re-read not only because of Phillips' rather diffuse and somewhat undisciplined style (were I his editor, the book would have been tightened up considerably and therefore likely reduced in length by about a third), but also because of a series of very challenging theses he advances. I will say more about those in the coming days as I continue to reflect on this deeply challenging book whose importance for Christians, I hope to show, is considerable, notwithstanding the fact the author evidences no interest in theology and in fact clearly indicates at one point he does not understand what it is.
The overall, if likely unintentional, thrust of Phillips' book very strongly reminds me of another recent study: David Henderson's Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-Dionysius and C.G. Jung. I shall say more about the "apophatic" proposals of Phillips in the coming days.

The Birthday of the Theotokos

Though I'm sure thoughts of the liturgical calendar rarely if ever enter into publisher's timelines, it is nonetheless a felicitous coincidence that just this month, in time for today's feast of the nativity of the Theotokos, an affordable paperback edition of an important book published in 2005 (and very favourably reviewed thereafter in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies), has been made available: Maria Vassilaki, Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium (Routledge, 2016), 416pp.

About this book we are told:

Fully illustrated in colour and black and white, Images of the Mother of God complements the successful exhibition catalogue of the 'Mother of God' exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens. It brings together the work of leading international authorities and younger scholars to provide a wide-ranging survey of how the Theotokos was perceived in the Byzantine world. It embraces the disciplines of art historians, archaeologists, traditional and feminist historians, as well as theologians, philologists and social anthropologists. Images of the Mother of God will appeal not just to those interested in Byzantine art and culture, but also to scholars of Western Europe in the Middle Ages who are looking for comparative materials in their own work.

The Virtues of Forgetting

As part of a long-term project of thinking about the ecclesiological, ecumenical, and ultimately soteriological implications of forgetting, which I have described in various posts you may view here, I picked up Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's book Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. It is a sobering assessment of the problems of a digital era in which people (e.g., Andrew Feldmar) could run into all sorts of problems from employers and governments (inter alia) relying on digitized "memories" of events in our past that, without context, may look (in the eyes of densely stupid bureaucrats, inter alia) sufficiently disqualifying to entering countries or companies alike.

Mayer-Schönberger documents the rise of long-term collective memory through the invention of language, and then books, especially after the invention of the printing press. But nothing has prepared us for the digital revolution in which the sheer quantity of information we can retain is utterly overwhelming, and becoming more so each year as the expense and effort in such retention becomes technically cheaper and easier.

He rightly issues a caution against putting too much faith in digital sources to do the remembering for us if we assume that such sources are incorrupt and will remain incorruptible. Even in an earlier, technically primitive era, it was still possible for the Trotskys of this world and others who had fallen into disfavor with the current regime to be 'erased' from pictures, articles, and entire editions of, say, the Soviet Encyclopedia. And as everyone knows today, it is possible to be constantly editing and deleting things from, e.g., Wikipedia. So digital "memory" can be just as malleable as human memory, though on a far wider and therefore much more dangerous scale.

In the end, the author proposes a number of suggestions, before focusing on in-built expiration dates for most on-line information--Amazon's "suggestions" of additional things we might like to buy, e.g., or cookies from retailers and search engines stored on our browsers. Endless forgetting is not the boon some may glibly assume, and contains real dangers. Mayer-Schönberger rightly reminds us of the virtues to be found in forgetting.

Between Sanity and Sanctity

I remain fascinated by the figures designated "holy fools," as I noted here. While predominant in the East, there are also significant examples--both literary and real--in the West, as I noted here.

One of the common recognitions in both East and West is that the line between sanity and sanctity is often blurred. As I heard a priest of the Toronto Oratory once put it about 20 years ago, if the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders were retroactively applied, then at least half the figures in the Roman Martyrology would be dismissed as likely insane by the standards of modern American psychiatry (such as they are). The Orthodox theologian and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware makes a similar point in his essay in The Byzantine Saint. I elaborate on all this and much more in my essay in Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna: Faith, Heresy, and Politics in Cultural Studies.

Now a new study is set for release later this month. Authored by Youval Rotman, Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: The Ambiguity of Religious Experience will be published by Harvard University Press (272pp.).

About this forthcoming study we are told:

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development.

Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior―like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr―to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from Paganism to Christianity.

A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

Clement of Alexandria's Moral Psychology

What is it about the great city of Alexandria that so many of its leading Christian intellectuals seem to have never shaken off a certain soupçon of heterodoxy? Whether we're talking Origen, Cyril, or Clement (inter alia--to say nothing of the infamous Arius of course) there remains in the minds of some just a bit of doubt, a bit of unease, as to how sound these men are.

Among them, Clement of Alexandria occupies a pivotal if at times controverted position within early Christianity, as I noted here. Some traditions have canonized him and recognize him as a patristic figure of great authority; others have done neither; still others view him as guilty of  heresy. A new book, set for September release, may shed more light on him: Kathleen Gibbons, The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria: Mosaic Philosophy (Routledge, 2016), 208pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement’s moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity’s relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement’s work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other.

While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement’s use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement’s discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of “free will” in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.

We are also given the table of contents:

Acknowledgements
Note on Translations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Mosaic Law in early Christianity
Chapter 2: Miming Moses: Clement’s Self-Presentation and the Dependency Theme
Chapter 3: Moses, Statesman and Philosopher
Chapter 4: The Logos of God, the Problem of Evil, and Clement’s Transformation of Providence
Chapter 5: Right Reason and the Gnostic’s Grasp of the Mosaic Law
Chapter 6: Clement’s Idiosyncratic Concept of Autonomy in the Context of Ancient Thought
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Images of Deification

Forthcoming in November is what looks to be a fascinating collection that brings together two very popular and important themes in Eastern thought--iconography and theosis: Visions of God and Ideas on Deification in Patristic Thought, eds. Mark Edwards and Elena Ene D-Vasilescu (Routledge, 2016), 244pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This volume illustrates the complexity and variety of early Christian thought on the subject of the image of God as a theological concept, and the difficulties that arise even in the interpretation of particular authors who gave a cardinal place to the image of God in their expositions of Christian doctrine. The first part illustrates both the presence and the absence of the image of God in the earliest Christian literature; the second examines various studies in deification, both implicit and explicit; the third explores the relation between iconography and the theological notion of the image

We are also given the table of contents:

Introduction
Part I. What is the image of God?
1. Martyrdom of Polycarp, Markus Vinzent
2. Growing like God: Some thoughts on Irenaeus of Lyons, Mark Edwards

Part II. Image and Eschatology. Deification 
3. ‘Love never fails, not even in death’. Gregory of Nyssa on theôsis, Elena Ene D-Vasilescu
4. Deification in the Alexandrian tradition, Mark Edwards
5. Not so alien and unnatural after all: the role of deification in Augustine’s sermons, Stanley P. Rosenberg
6. Union with and likeness to God: Deification according to Dionysius the Areopagite, Filip Ivanovic
7. Like a glowing sword. St Maximus on deification, Torstein Theodor Tollefsen

Part III. Image of God and Byzantine/Meta-Byzantine Icon 
8. Communion with God and theology of the icon: a study of the Christological iconology of St. John of Damascus, Dimitrios Pallis
9. The vision of God and the deification of man: the visual implications of theôsis, Clemena Antonova

Bibliography
Index

Whose Caliph? Which Caliphate?

In teaching a course to my students this summer about ISIS and the Crusades, we had occasion to illustrate my point about the uses and abuses of history, including romanticized nostalgia for a past that never was, by discussing the notion of a caliph and a caliphate that ISIS makes so much of today. In doing so ISIS conveniently ignores the fact that the last caliphate was unceremoniously abolished in 1924 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (recently discussed here) and an attempt at resurrecting it two years later met with a collective shrug of indifference from the Islamic world. The last caliph himself was wanted by nobody in the Islamic world, and so had to be ingloriously shipped off to exile in Paris via a British gunboat.

The history of the caliphate, then, and any coherent understanding of that office, let alone resurrection of it, are all therefore far from straightforward, and the idea that it is a central institution demanded if not beloved by all Muslims is obviously false. The complexities of all this are discussed in a forthcoming book by Hugh Kennedy, Caliphate: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, October 2016), 336pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In Caliphate, Islamic historian Hugh Kennedy dissects the idea of the caliphate and its history, and explores how it became used and abused today. Contrary to popular belief, there is no one enduring definition of a caliph; rather, the idea of the caliph has been the subject of constant debate and transformation over time. Kennedy offers a grand history of the caliphate since the beginning of Islam to its modern incarnations. Originating in the tumultuous years following the death of the Mohammad in 632, the caliphate, a politico-religious system, flourished in the great days of the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. From the seventh-century Orthodox caliphs to the nineteenth-century Ottomans, Kennedy explores the tolerant rule of Umar, recounts the traumatic murder of the caliph Uthman, dubbed a tyrant by many, and revels in the flourishing arts of the golden eras of Abbasid Baghdad and Moorish Andalucía. Kennedy also examines the modern fate of the caliphate, unraveling the British political schemes to spur dissent against the Ottomans and the ominous efforts of Islamists, including ISIS, to reinvent the history of the caliphate for their own malevolent political ends.

In exploring and explaining the great variety of caliphs who have ruled throughout the ages, Kennedy challenges the very narrow views of the caliphate propagated by extremist groups today. An authoritative new account of the dynasties of Arab leaders throughout the Islamic Golden Age, Caliphate traces the history—and misappropriations—of one of the world’s most potent political ideas.

Kennedy is author of an earlier study of some use: The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In.

Sacramental Theology

A year ago last week this volume finally appeared in print, but it is only this week that I have been able to work it into one of my courses with the beginning of this academic year. So for those who missed it a year ago when I drew attention to it, I reprint my post from then about a very substantial and impressive collection, which is ideally suited for classroom usage: Matthew Levering and Hans Boersma, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology (Oxford, 2015), 736pp.

Though I am of course somewhat biased, I do think the publisher is correct in enumerating some of the virtues of this collection thus, saying the handbook

• Provides a multi-faceted introduction to sacramental theology

• Introduces readers to the historical roots and development of Christian sacramental worship

• Was written by an international team of authors who are leading practitioners of the discipline

We are further told about this book:

As a multi-faceted introduction to sacramental theology, the purposes of this Handbook are threefold: historical, ecumenical, and missional. The forty-four chapters are organized into the following parts five parts: Sacramental Roots in Scripture, Patristic Sacramental Theology, Medieval Sacramental Theology, From the Reformation through Today, and Philosophical and Theological Issues in Sacramental Doctrine.

Contributors to this Handbook explain the diverse ways that believers have construed the sacraments, both in inspired Scripture and in the history of the Church's practice. In Scripture and the early Church, Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics all find evidence that the first Christian communities celebrated and taught about the sacraments in a manner that Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics today affirm as the foundation of their own faith and practice. Thus, for those who want to understand what has been taught about the sacraments in Scripture and across the generations by the major thinkers of the various Christian traditions, this Handbook provides an introduction. As the divisions in Christian sacramental understanding and practice are certainly evident in this Handbook, it is not thereby without ecumenical and missional value. This book evidences that the story of the Christian sacraments is, despite divisions in interpretation and practice, one of tremendous hope.

And as you peruse this Table of Contents you will note many prominent scholars of Eastern Christianity (noted in italics)

Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering: Introduction: The Handbook's Three Purposes

Sacramental Roots in Scripture
1: Walter Moberly: Sacramentality And The Old Testament
2: Dennis T. Olson: Sacramentality in the Torah
3: Craig A. Evans and Jeremiah J. Johnston: Intertestamental Background of the Christian Sacraments
4: Nicholas Perrin: Sacraments and Sacramentality in the New Testament
5: Edith M. Humphrey: Sacrifice and Sacrament: Sacramental Implications of the Death of Christ
6: Richard Bauckham: Sacraments and the Gospel of John
7: David Lincicum: Sacraments in the Pauline Epistles
8: Luke Timothy Johnson: Sacramentality and Sacraments in Hebrews

Patristic Sacramental Theology
9: Everett Ferguson: Sacraments in the Pre-Nicene Period
10: Khaled Anatolios: Sacraments in the Fourth Century
11: Lewis Ayres and Thomas Humphries: Augustine and the West to AD 650
12: Andrew Louth: Late Patristic Developments in Sacramental Theology in the East (Fifth-Ninth Century)

Medieval Sacramental Theology
13: Mark G. Vaillancourt: Sacramental Theology from Gottschalk to Lanfranc
14: Boyd Taylor Coolman: The Christo-Pneumatic-Ecclesial Character of Twelfth-Century Sacramental Theology
15: Joseph Wawrykow: The Sacraments In Thirteenth-Century Theology
16: Ian Christopher Levy: Sacraments in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
17: Yury P. Avvakumov: Sacramental Ritual in Middle and Later Byzantine Theology, 9th -15th centuries

From the Reformation through Today
18: Mickey L. Mattox: Sacraments in the Lutheran Reformation
19: Michael Allen: Sacraments in the Reformed and Anglican Reformation
20: John Rempel: Sacraments in the Radical Reformation
21: Peter Walter, Translated by David L. Augustine: Sacraments in the Council of Trent and 16th Century Catholic Theology
22: Brian A. Butcher: Orthodox Sacramental Theology: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
23: Trent Pomplun: Post-Tridentine Sacramental Theology
24: Scott R. Swain: Lutheran and Reformed Sacramental Theology, 17th-19th Centuries
25: E. Brooks Holifield: Sacramental Theology in America, 17th through 19th Centuries
26: .: Twentieth Century and Contemporary Protestant Sacramental Theology
Part I: Martha L. Moore-Keish: Sacraments in General and Baptism in Twentieth Century and Contemporary Protestant Theology
Part II: George Hunsinger: The Lord's Supper in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Protestant Theology
27: Peter Casarella: Catholic Sacramental Theology in the Twentieth Century
28: Peter Galadza: Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Orthodox Sacramental Theology

Dogmatic Approaches
29: David W. Fagerberg: Liturgy, Signs, and Sacraments
30: Geoffrey Wainwright: One Baptism, One Church?
31: C. C. Pecknold and Lucas Laborde, S.S.J.: Confirmation
32: Bruce D. Marshall: What is the Eucharist? A Dogmatic Outline
33: Brent Waters: Marriage
34: Adam DeVille: The Sacrament of Orders Dogmatically Understood
35: Anthony Akinwale, O.P.: Reconciliation
36: John C. Kasza: Anointing of the Sick

Philosophical and Theological Issues in Sacramental Doctrine
37: Thomas Joseph White, O.P: Sacraments and Philosophy
38: Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P. Translated by Dominic M. Langevin, O.P.: The Sacraments and the Development of Doctrine
39: David Brown: A Sacramental World: Why It Matters
40: Francesca Aran Murphy: Christ, The Trinity, and The Sacraments
41: Peter J. Leithart: Signs of the Eschatological Ekklesia: The Sacraments, the Church, and Eschatology
42: Gordon W. Lathrop: Liturgy, Preaching and the Sacraments
43: C. J. C. Pickstock: Sense and Sacrament
44: Jorge Scampini, O.P: The Sacraments in Ecumenical Dialogue

Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity

When it first appeared in 2008, I read with great interest Susan Wessel's fascinating and important study, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome. Among other things, it sheds important light on Leo's role in the Council of Chalcedon, including its famous controverted 28th canon about patriarchal jurisdictions and so-called Roman pre-eminence. Wessel's considerable achievement was to show that Leo--pace later Eastern fears--was not engaged in a campaign of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the East. In fact, both Rome and Constantinople misunderstood the motives and actions of each other when, in fact, it seems they were both concerned about maintaining ecclesial affairs in their own spheres "decently and in good order," without trying to one-up each other.

Now we have another book from Wessel, published just this summer: Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 290pp.

The publisher, who has made this book available both in print and in a Kindle format, tells us the following about the book:

This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion.

We are also given the table of contents here and an excerpt here.

Erich Fromm on Love and Freedom

The would-be psychoanalyst in me is always curious as to whether there are any patterns or discernible reasons for why the mind circles back at unexpected moments to books one read decades ago and had by now all but forgotten. In my case, I have been giving a great deal of thought to Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, first published in 1941. Some twenty or more years ago now, I found an original copy in a wonderfully quiet and out-of-the way used bookstore in Ottawa that has, alas, long since closed.

This book of Fromm's seems perhaps freshly suited to understanding much of what is going on in our time, including in presidential politics here in Her Britannic Majesty's erstwhile American colonies.

As I have been thinking on that book again, and wondering about reading more of Fromm's life, I see, perusing the back-lists of Columbia University Press, that just such an intellectual biography was recently published: The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet (CUP, 2014), 410pp.

About this book, which I'm looking forward to reading, the publisher tells us:

Erich Fromm was a political activist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. Known for his theories of personality and political insight, Fromm dissected the sadomasochistic appeal of brutal dictators while also eloquently championing love—which, he insisted, was nothing if it did not involve joyful contact with others and humanity at large. Admired all over the world, Fromm continues to inspire with his message of universal brotherhood and quest for lasting peace.

The first systematic study of Fromm's influences and achievements, this biography revisits the thinker's most important works, especially Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving, which conveyed important and complex ideas to millions of readers. The volume recounts Fromm's political activism as a founder and major funder of Amnesty International, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and other peace groups. Consulting rare archival materials across the globe, Lawrence J. Friedman reveals Fromm's support for anti-Stalinist democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe and his efforts to revitalize American democracy. For the first time, readers learn about Fromm's direct contact with high officials in the American government on matters of war and peace while accessing a deeper understanding of his conceptual differences with Freud, his rapport with Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, and his association with innovative artists, public intellectuals, and world leaders. Friedman elucidates Fromm's key intellectual contributions, especially his innovative concept of "social character," in which social institutions and practices shape the inner psyche, and he clarifies Fromm's conception of love as an acquired skill. Taking full stock of the thinker's historical and global accomplishments, Friedman portrays a man of immense authenticity and spirituality who made life in the twentieth century more humane than it might have been.

Assyrian Genocide

I gave a lecture last year on the centenary of the Armenian genocide, and took the occasion to note two coterminous but lesser known genocides at the time: that of Greek and Assyrian Christians in Anatolia. The Armenian genocide, as I have noted on here frequently, has occasioned a great deal of scholarly attention in the last two decades, but knowledge of the other two has largely been confined to a handful of scholarly articles in relatively recondite journals--until now.

Forthcoming later this year by Joseph Yacoub is Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History 1st Edition Oxford UP, 2016, 288pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Armenian genocide of 1915 has been well documented. Much less known is the Turkish genocide of the Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac peoples, which occurred simultaneously in their ancient homelands in and around ancient Mesopotamia - now Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The advent of the First World War gave the Young Turks and the Ottoman government the opportunity to exterminate the Assyrians in a series of massacres and atrocities inflicted on a people whose culture dates back millennia and whose language, Aramaic, was spoken by Jesus. Systematic killings, looting, rape, kidnapping and deportations destroyed countless communities and created a vast refugee diaspora. As many as 300,000 Assyro-Chaldean- Syriac people were murdered and a larger number forced into exile. The "Year of the Sword" (Seyfo) in 1915 was preceded over millennia by other attacks on the Assyrians and has been mirrored by recent events, not least the abuses committed by Islamic State.

Joseph Yacoub, whose family was murdered and dispersed, has gathered together a compelling range of eye-witness accounts and reports which cast light on this 'hidden genocide.' Passionate and yet authoritative in its research, his book reveals a little-known human and cultural tragedy. A century after the Assyrian genocide, the fate of this Christian minority hangs in the balance.

Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Christianity

The Orthodox scholar Scott Kenworthy alerted me to the publication of this hefty and impressive collection containing chapters on Orthodoxy by James Skedros and John McGuckin as well as Scott himself--in addition to articles on Middle Eastern Christianity and much else besides of interest to the Christian East: Lamin Sanneh and Michael McClymond, eds., The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Christianity (2016), 784pp.

About this collection the publisher provides the briefest of blurbs:

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Christianity presents a collection of essays that explore a range of topics relating to the rise, spread, and influence of Christianity throughout the world.

But we are also given a detailed table of contents:

Notes on Contributors ix
Abbreviations xxi
1 Introduction 1
Lamin Sanneh and Michael J. McClymond

I. Historical Section 19
A. The Roots (50–1750 ce)
2 Jewish and Hellenic Worlds and Christian Origins 21
John J. Collins
3 The “Triumph” of Hellenization in Early Christianity 32
Wendy Elgersma Helleman
4 Ancient Eastern Christianity: Syria, Persia, Central Asia, and India 43
Scott W. Sunquist
5 Christianity and the European Conversions 54
Tomás O’Sullivan
6 Byzantium and Islam in the Mediterranean World 67
James C. Skedros
7 The Medieval Synthesis: Religion, Society, and Culture 78
Joseph P. Huffmann
8 Early Modern Missions and Maritime Expansion 96
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
9 Bibles, Printing, Books, Churches 107
Lori Ferrell
10 The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation 119
Jeffrey Klaiber

B. Issues in the Modern Period (1750–2000 ce) 129
11 The Legacy of Christendom 131
Philip Jenkins
12 Slavery, Antislavery, and Christianity: Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean 142
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
13 Medicine, Agriculture, and Technology in the Missionary Enterprise 153
Christopher H. Grundmann
14 Schools and Education in the Missionary Enterprise 166
Norman Etherington
15 Conversion, Converts, and National Identity 176
J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu
16 Church and State Relations in the Colonial Period 190
Brian Stanley
17 Ideologies, the Quest for a Just Society, and Christian Responses 200
Govert Buijs
18 The Ecumenical Movement: Why Violence, Why Not Peace? 218
Jan van Butselaar
19 Vatican II: Renewal, Accommodation, Inculturation 231
Peter C. Phan
20 Christian Revival and Renewal Movements 244
Michael J. McClymond

II. Thematic Section 263
21 Bible Translation, Culture, and Religion 265
Lamin Sanneh
22 Christianity and Interreligious Encounters 282
Martin Ganeri
23 Women in Church, State, and Society 302
Angelyn Dries
24 Worship, Liturgy, Sacraments 318
Geoffrey Wainwright
25 Freedom, Persecution, and the Status of Christian Minorities 330
John Witte, Jr. and M. Christian Green
26 Christianity and “Western Classical” Music (1700–2000) 350
David Martin
27 Music in the Newer Churches 359
Brian Schrag
28 Visual Arts in World Christianity 368
Volker Küster
29 Church Architecture Worldwide since 1800 386
David R. Bains
30 Charismatic Gifts: Healing, Tongue-Speaking, Prophecy, and Exorcism 399
Michael J. McClymond
31 Changing Uses of Old and New Media in World Christianity 419
Jolyon Mitchell and Jeremy Kidwell
32 Global Evangelical and Pentecostal Politics 432
Paul Freston

III. Christianity Since 1800: An Analysis by Regions and Traditions 449
33 The Middle East and North Africa, I: Egypt and North Africa 451
George Berbary
34 The Middle East and North Africa, II: Christians in the Ottoman Empire and in Bilad al-Sham 458
Souad Slim
35 African Christianity: Historical and Thematic Horizons 468
Lamin Sanneh
36 Christianity in Western Europe 488
Simon Coleman
37 Russia and Eastern Europe 500
Scott M. Kenworthy
38 Latin America and the Caribbean 511
Stephen Dove
39 North America 523
Amanda Porterfield
40 South Asia 535
Chandra Mallampalli
41 China 546
Daniel H. Bays
42 Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia 561
J. Nelson Jennings, Yong Kyu Park, and Antolin V. Uy
43 Christianity in Australia and Oceania (ca. 1800–2000) 575
Stuart Piggin and Peter Lineham
44 The Historical Development of Christianity in Oceania 588
Manfred Ernst and Anna Anisi
45 Roman Catholicism since 1800 605
Thomas P. Rausch
46 Orthodoxy and Eastern Christianity 617
John A. McGuckin
47 Anglicanism 628
Kevin Ward
48 Protestantism 641
Alister McGrath
49 Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity 653
Allan H. Anderson
50 Indigenous and Vernacular Christianity 664
Michèle Miller Sigg, Eva M. Pascal, and Gina A. Zurlo

IV. Expansion and Secularization: A Demographic and Statistical Analysis 683
51 The Transmission of Christian Faith: A Reflection 685
Andrew Walls
52 The Demographics and Dynamics of the World Christian Movement 699
Todd M. Johnson
53 Christianity in Europe and North America: Decline, Transition, or Pluralization? 719
David Martin

Index 733

Antioch vs. Alexandria, Round #19824307

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Christian East, or patristic and exegetical history, has invariably and frequently encountered the famed, if not hackneyed, Antioch-Alexandria "divide" when it comes to hermeneutics and exegesis as well as Christology. Any nostrum that is repeated as often as this one deserves to come in for fresh re-examination, and it appears we have it in a recent study by Richard Perhai, Antiochene Theoria in the Writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret of Cyrus (Fortress, 2015).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Biblical scholars have often contrasted the exegesis of the early church fathers from the eastern region and “school” of Syrian Antioch against that of the school of Alexandria. The Antiochenes have often been described as strictly historical-literal exegetes in contrast to the allegorical exegesis of the Alexandrians. Patristic scholars now challenge those stereotypes, some even arguing that few differences existed between the two groups.

This work agrees that both schools were concerned with a literal and spiritual reading. But, it also tries to show, through analysis of Theodore and Theodoret’s exegesis and use of the term theoria, that how they integrated the literal-theological readings often remained quite distinct from the Alexandrians. For the Antiochenes, the term theoria did not mean allegory, but instead stood for a range of perceptions—prophetic, christological, and contemporary. It is in these insights that we find the deep wisdom to help modern readers interpret Scripture theologically.

Shared Spaces

Forthcoming in October is a paperback version of a book previously published in hardback. Edited by Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey, Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution (Columbia UP, 2016; 440pp. + maps & photos) is an anthology that looks at numerous places where Eastern Christians have lived alongside Muslims, Jews, and other Christians. This book seeks, as the publisher tells us, to

explore the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences.

These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence, while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm

The publisher also gives us the table of contents:

Introduction, by Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey
1. Religious Pluralism, Shared Sacred Sites, and the Ottoman Empire, by Karen Barkey

Comparisons: Cyprus/Bosnia/Anatolia/Algiers:
2. Three Ways of Sharing the Sacred: Choreographies of Coexistence in Cyprus, by Mete Hatay
3. Religious Antagonism and Shared Sanctuaries in Algeria, by Dionigi Albera
4. Contested Choreographies of Sacred Spaces in Muslim Bosnia, by David Henig

Palestine/Israel:
5. At the Boundaries of the Sacred: The Reinvention of Everyday Life in Jerusalem's al-Wad Street, by Wendy Pullan
6. The Politics of Ownership: State, Governance, and the Status Quo in the Church of the Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre), by Glenn Bowman
7. Choreographing Upheaval: The Politics of Sacred Sites in the West Bank, by Elazar Barkan
8. The Impact of Conflicts Over Holy Sites on City Images and Landscapes: The Case of Nazareth, by Rassem Khamaisi

Museums:
9. Tolerance Versus Holiness: The Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance and the Mamilla Muslim Cemetery, by Yitzhak Reiter
10. Secularizing the Unsecularizable: A Comparative Study of the Haci Bektas and Mevlana Museums in Turkey, by Rabia Harmansah, Tugba Tanyeri-Erdemir, and Robert M. Hayden

Bibliography
Contributors
Index

On the Ecumenism of Exploding Heads

I shall let you in on three secrets:

1) In the 1990s, numerous evangelicals entered Orthodoxy, details of which are to be found in several studies, including the superlative one of D.O. Herbel, Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. (I interviewed the author here.)

2) Some of those converts turned around and scorned their Protestant heritage, and indeed all non-Orthodox Christians of whatever tradition, loudly and virulently denouncing them as heretics and any efforts at working with them as guilty of the "pan-heresy" of "ecumenism," all phrases that nobody uses except tendentiously and as weaponry.

3) Some evangelicals repay the favour, as it were, if they even know anything at all about Orthodoxy, which they often regard as being in essence a version of Roman Catholicism: icon-worshipping, Mary-devoted, priest-confessing, works-righteous folks with too many statues in their churches and too much formality in that weird biscuit ceremony they call 'Mass' or 'liturgy.'

What, then, will past and present evangelicals and Orthodox alike make of the co-operative efforts of a new book that brings both together in missionary efforts? Will we see an ecumenical explosion of heads?

Edited by Mark Oxbrow and Tim Grass, The Mission of God: Studies in Orthodox and Evangelical Mission (Wipf and Stock, 2016), 270pp. is a collection of essays which has garnered a variety of positive blurbs from evangelical and Orthodox folks:

This is a 'must read' collection of essays that are rooted in prayer, in the Scriptures and in the rich histories of two very different traditions. The variety of topics and perspectives are presented by senior scholars and leaders, giving the reader an excellent glimpse into the ways in which Orthodox and Evangelical Christians around the globe have come together to participate in God's transforming mission. I highly recommend it for all pastors, seminary and Bible college students and staff. (Dr. C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell, PhD, Executive Director, Theological Commission, World Evangelical Alliance.)

The wealth of material in this extraordinary symposium is indicated by the widely dispersed backgrounds - geographical, cultural, and theological - of its contributors. I cannot think of a comparable example in which the evangelical mission of the Church is placed so firmly in the varying contexts of theology, ethics, exegesis, ecumenism, and spiritual transformation. Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, Orthodox Pastor in Chicago and Senior Editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 

Can Evangelical and Orthodox Christians move from exclusion and competition of the past to mutuality and complementarity in the present? Can the depth of a powerful spiritual tradition be (re)discovered and in some ways appropriated by modern activistic evangelizers and can they both be enriched by each other's strengths? The amazing recent dialogues in the spirit and under the umbrella of the Lausanne Movement for world evangelization - as documented by this extraordinary book - provide us with promising answers to these questions. Diversity, quality and experience of the contributors assure the reader that this compendium points the way toward a future of greater understanding and desirable partnerships in the mission of the Triune God in our complex world. Ecumenism at its best! (Dr. Peter Kuzmic Eva B. and Paul E. Toms Distinguished Professor of World Missions and European Studies, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.)

Can a Blind Man See?

As I have noted on here over the years, few figures from Christian antiquity continue to incite as much interest or controversy as Origen of Alexandria. A recent study looks at someone working within and struggling with his legacy: Grant D. Bayliss, The Vision of Didymus the Blind: A Fourth-Century Virtue-Origenism (Oxford UP, 2016), 304pp.

About this book we are told:

An independent teacher, based in Alexandria throughout the second half of the fourth century, Didymus appealed to many within the broadly Origenist currents of Egyptian asceticism, including Jerome, Rufinus, and Evagrius. His commentaries, lecture-notes, and theological treatises show him specifically committed to the legacy of Origen and Philo, rather than a broader "Alexandrian" or noetic reading of Scripture. Yet his concern was not to answer classic "Antiochene" critique but rather offer a faithful continuation of many aspects of Origen's thought and exegesis, now made consistent with the broader anti-subordinationist developments in Nicene faith from the 350s onwards. In doing so he made virtue a primary category of reality, human existence, and life, in ways that go beyond the traditional philosophical tropes.

This "turn to virtue" draws parallels with wider fourth-century trends but it sets Didymus' own Origenism apart from those of other Origenists, such as Eusebius of Caesarea or Evagrius of Pontus. Thus detailed discussion focuses on Didymus' portrayal of virtue, sin, and passion, which together form the constant hermeneutical terrain for his anagogical exegesis and exhortation to a dynamic process of ascent. Speculative comments of Origen on the pre-existence of the soul, salvation of the devil, pre-passion, and the sin of Adam are shown to be reframed, both to aid the individual's navigation of the return to virtue and to answer the challenge of contemporary Manichaean and Apollinarian beliefs.

On the Falling Asleep and Rising to Glory of the Glorious Mother of God

With Vespers tonight the fast shall end and the great feast of the Dormition/Assumption of the Mother of God begin, showing all of us who follow her Son what awaits us in the resurrection to come.

As we anticipate this lovely feast, I call your attention again to several books noted on here over the years.

For patristic devotions, see the fine collection amassed and translated by Brian Daley, On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies.

For historical scholarship on the feast the go-to man is Stephen Shoemaker. His first book, from 2006, is The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption.

In 2012, he published a translation of Maximus the Confessor's The Life of the Virgin.

And then, just last month, also from Yale University Press, we have his latest study: Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (2016), 304pp.

About this most recent book we are told:

For the first time a noted historian of Christianity explores the full story of the emergence and development of the Marian cult in the early Christian centuries. The means by which Mary, mother of Jesus, came to prominence have long remained strangely overlooked despite, or perhaps because of, her centrality in Christian devotion. Gathering together fresh information from often neglected sources, including early liturgical texts and Dormition and Assumption apocrypha, Stephen Shoemaker reveals that Marian devotion played a far more vital role in the development of early Christian belief and practice than has been previously recognized, finding evidence that dates back to the latter half of the second century. Through extensive research, the author is able to provide a fascinating background to the hitherto inexplicable “explosion” of Marian devotion that historians and theologians have pondered for decades, offering a wide-ranging study that challenges many conventional beliefs surrounding the subject of Mary, Mother of God.