Mark Roosien on Bulgakov and the Eucharist

Just a month ago now, I was able to interview an author about his newly translated collection of Sergius Bulgakov's works. You may read that wonderfully fascinating interview with Roberto de la Noval here. 

Now we have another translation of another work of Bulgakov: The Eucharistic Sacrifice, trans. Mark Roosien (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). 140pp. I wrote to Mark to ask about his work, and his thoughts follow. 

AD: Tell us about your background

MR: I was born and raised in West Michigan and attended North Park University in Chicago where I majored in philosophy. After studying Russian for a year in the city of Cheboksary, Russia, I attended the University of Notre Dame where I received an MTS and PhD in theology, focusing on liturgical studies and early Christianity. I was ordained as a deacon in the Orthodox Church in America in 2018. I am currently Lecturer in liturgical studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

AD: How did you get into the world of theological translation, and specifically the Russian tradition?

MR: I’ve had an interest in Russian literature since making an extended visit to Moscow in 1999 when I was 12 years old. Those were interesting times in Russia, to say the least. In college I acquired an interest in Russian religious thought, and when I studied Russian intensively between college and grad school I would spend evenings reading Berdyaev with a dictionary.

The Eucharistic Sacrifice is my first published foray into translation. I discovered the book somewhat by accident (I had never seen anyone write about it—it was published in Russian only in 2005), as I was doing research for a question on Bulgakov for my doctoral candidacy exams. The translation project began simply as a way to keep up my Russian, but I soon realized that it was an important text that deserved wide readership.

AD: Interest in Bulgakov has been on a steady upward trajectory for the better part of two decades now. What lies behind this do you think?

MR: The “material cause” for this, I suppose, is the steady stream of English translations that have appeared since the turn of the century, especially by Boris Jakim, Thomas Allan Smith and Catherine Evtuhov, and more lately Stephen Churchyard and Roberto De La Noval. 

But more importantly, I think Bulgakov was simply ahead of his time. I have a few (debatable) pet theories as to why it is only now that he has acquired such status. I may as well lay them out here. The world needed to pass through the gauntlet of World War II, the stagnation of the American and European empires, and the fall of the Soviet Union to appreciate his prophetic critique of modernity in its capitalist and communist incarnations. 

The theological academy needed to wrestle for some time with the likes of Barth, Rahner and von Balthasar, especially on the question of the relationship between nature and grace, to appreciate the originality of Bulgakov’s theological interventions. Western culture needed to exhaust the possibilities of modern art to see Sophiology as more than just another version of romanticism. 

Finally, as Celia Deane-Drummond has shown, rising awareness of climate change has proved Bulgakov to be an important conversation partner in eco-theology, a relatively recent subfield in theology. 

AD: Let's get right to the title and focus: eucharistic sacrifice. Here I am taken back immediately to my Anglican childhood, reading the Thirty Nine Articles, and being sternly lectured that "Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits." Bulgakov would obviously have a different take on this, so give us a brief overview of his ideas.

MR: As is typical of Bulgakov on many theological questions, he would say, “yes and no.” As my dear friend and fellow Bulgakov translator Roberto De La Noval likes to say, never has a thinker wanted so much to have it both ways. 

Bulgakov would say this: There is danger in a narrow focus on the eucharist as sacrifice, which is evident in certain liturgical abuses. He sees such an abuse in the practice of votive masses, where, at least in the Western Middle Ages, one could pay a priest to say a mass for someone—to make a sacrifice on their behalf—and not even show up for the mass oneself. Bulgakov would certainly agree that Christ is not sacrificed “again” in the liturgy in the way that might be implied by this practice, since Christ cannot be crucified more than once. 

Following the Epistle to the Hebrews, he holds that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is the sole sacrifice for sins, made “once and for all.” But he takes it a step further–and this is the main thrust of The Eucharistic Sacrifice. The crucifixion of Christ, his sacrificial offering on the cross, is but the pinnacle of a larger, all-encompassing sacrifice: the eternal, sacrificial love that is God. The cross, which sums up Christ’s entire cruciform life, is the manifestation in time of an eternal reality. That reality is the sacrificial love of God in the Trinity which is poured out in the creation of the world and the Incarnation of the Word (including His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, etc.)

This threefold exitus—trinitarian kenosis, the creation, and the Incarnation–is the sacrificial work of Divine love and salvation. The eucharist is Jacob’s Ladder, the means for the world’s reditus up into the divine life of the Trinity. The eucharist is how that salvation is made real for us, how human beings participate in the divine-human sacrifice. The eucharist manifests the eternal sacrifice of God through God’s kenosis made available to human beings on any altar at any time and any place. In other words, it is a “repetition”—but not a “re-crucifixion.” It is the endless sacramental presence in time of one single, salvific reality of sacrifice that is both temporal and eternal, heavenly and earthly.

AD: More recently, Terry Eagleton has taken up the topic of sacrifice, and argues that we misunderstand it if we only see it as self-renunciation and self-denial. How might Bulgakov respond to this?

MR: Bulgakov would agree. For him, sacrifice is above all life-giving, not life-abnegating. It is an act of creativity—as every artist knows. It is inevitable that in humanity’s fallen state we cannot help but see sacrifice in terms of denial of the good and beautiful. What, after all, is uglier than blood sacrifice? 

In the Eucharistic Sacrifice, however, Bulgakov takes apart the act of sacrifice and unveils the ways in which, in its essence, it is about the gift of life. For him, the ultimate meaning of sacrifice is found in God’s kenotic, creative love, which is revealed on the cross. While the crucifixion is indeed ugly and terrifying, it is also, in a profound sense, beautiful. As one of the texts for Sunday Vespers in the Byzantine reads, “When you appeared, O Christ, nailed upon the cross, you altered the beauty of created things.” Through the “life-giving cross” (as we say often in Byzantine liturgy), we see the beautiful, creative nature of sacrifice.

AD: You note in your introduction that Bulgakov's 1930 essay "The Eucharistic Dogma" grew out of his "love affair with Roman Catholicism a decade earlier." Tell us more about this.

Bulgakov was ordained a priest in 1918, just in time to witness firsthand what he perceived as the collapse of the Russian Orthodox Church under Bolshevik pressure. By 1921 or so (as revealed in his letters and diaries), he had concluded that the reason the Russian Church collapsed so quickly was because of its rotten ecclesiology. In order to restore the church and stand firm against the winds of modernity, the Orthodox Church needed to unite with the Roman papacy. 

To make a long story short, he abandoned this position by 1924 for both personal and theological reasons, but was forever grateful that he passed through what he later called the “fires” of Catholicism, because it purified his own ideas. In the “The Eucharistic Dogma,” he lays out his case against the Thomistic formulation of transubstantiation and in so doing levels a critique against the metaphysics and method of scholasticism that he had earlier so admired (and in many ways continued to admire, but from greater critical distance). 

AD: You mention a 1933 essay on the connection between the Eucharist and social problems and its ecumenical application to the Orthodox-Anglican relationship. Tell us how and why, as you say, Bulgakov "advocated for (limited) eucharistic intercommunion  between Anglicans and Orthodox." Did he also hold such views with regard to Catholics?

MR: Bulgakov’s failed attempt at reunion with Rome in the early 1920’s soured him somewhat on Catholicism. Many of the Roman Catholics with whom he shared his ideas on church reunion met them with bewilderment and, as he tells it, simply tried to convert him to Roman Catholicism. He resented this. It is perhaps for this reason he didn’t pursue Orthodox-Catholic reunion again. But Bulgakov always appreciated Western Christianity a great deal. He simply found the Roman papacy in its post-Vatican I form to be too great a theological obstacle for church reunion. Yet he saw an opening for ecumenical relations with the Anglicans in the early 1930’s, especially because they did not have a papacy and thus in theory might have fewer obstacles to church reunion. Unfortunately, the talks failed and intercommunion was not established.

Clearly, Bulgakov, believed in the necessity of the eventually reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Here’s what Bulgakov wrote about Catholicism in the 1940s, toward the end of his life: “The time for a relationship based on mutual recognition and respect for one another’s individual character has not yet come for Eastern and Western Christianity…It is the task of love which is the life of the church to bridge the chasm by working together, and thus prepare the ground for the reunion of the churches”(Autobiographical Notes, [Russian edition], YMCA Press, 1946, pp. 48-49). 

I wonder what he would say today. Have we gotten any closer to such a relationship based on mutual recognition that could form a groundwork for reunion? While I find some hope in the mutual appreciation and, it seems, genuine affection between Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, there are also many reasons for pessimism. 

AD: At the end of your introduction you very briefly discuss the interaction between, and only partial influence of Bulgakov on Schmemann as these two differed in some important respects. Describe where they differed.

MR: For one thing, Schmemann was not very interested in metaphysics and definitely not in theological systems. He was basically averse to Bulgakov’s Sophiology, though perhaps more in form than in content. Schmemann, in my reading, attempted to communicate plainly and almost artlessly the experience of the Kingdom that Bulgakov expressed using the more abstract language of Sophiology. 

I suspect that the passages in Bulgakov’s books that Schmemann liked best were the autobiographical ones in which his former teacher painted lyrical, vivid pictures of the experience of God in the here and now. This is precisely what Schmemann was trying to do in his books on liturgical theology. So, I tend to see them in continuity more than others do, at least in terms of content, even though their style and theological mood is very different. 

AD: Having finished this translation, what are you at work on now?

I mentioned my brilliant friend Roberto above—he and I are working together on a translation of Bulgakov’s Spiritual Diary written in 1924-5 while he was in Prague, just before he moved to Paris to found and lead the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. I know that Rob described the book already on this blog, but I will just add this. I believe that it was in these years that Bulgakov became the Bulgakov that we know from his great trilogies, which were all written after this time. What is revealing, and perhaps surprising, about the Spiritual Diary is that it shows that Bulgakov did not see his calling as fundamentally a theological or academic one. The many personal and professional tragedies that he had experienced until that point humbled him in some of his grand ideas for church reunion or theological renewal. Rather, by this time, he saw his mission primarily as a pastoral one. How might it change the way we read Bulgakov’s theology when we keep in mind this fundamental orientation? Although we tend to see Bulgakov’s theology as highly complex and abstract, he was, I believe, getting at something that resides at the core of the life of faith in its concrete experience. To me, that is why Bulgakov still speaks. 

I’m also plugging away at the endless project of turning my dissertation into a book. The book will be on theological and liturgical responses to natural disasters—especially earthquakes—in Byzantine Constantinople. It is a historical/theological study that unites liturgical and environmental history. In addition to being a contribution to the field of liturgical studies, I hope that it will also be a resource for those (like myself) who are interested in critically wrestling with the tradition as the church finds ways to boldly and faithfully respond to climate change.

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

MR: At roughly 120 pages, this book is a great short introduction to Bulgakov’s thought. As one of his final writings, it touches on and summarizes nearly every major aspect of his ideas in their most mature form. I hope that it will serve as an entry-point for those who are interested in Bulgakov but don’t know where to start. 

It’s also an important text for 20th century sacramental theology, in that, more than any other thinker that I know of, Bulgakov articulates the connection between the eucharist and the Trinity. So this book will certainly appeal to anyone who is interested in sacramental theology, systematic theology, and Orthodox theology. 

Finally, I hope this book will help make some headway in ecumenical discussions on the fraught notion of the eucharistic as sacrifice, which has been divisive issue among the churches since the Reformation.

Michael Plekon on the Church and Community

I recently drew your attention to Michael Plekon's new book, Community as Church, Church as Community. In keeping with longstanding custom on here, where I have interviewed him in the past about other books, I recently sent him some questions about the book, and here are his thoughts. 

AD: Tell us about your background, especially recent changes

MP: The biggest change is that in late August 2017 I retired almost 40 years to the day I began at The City University of New York, Baruch College. I had begun this new book then, but it mostly was completed and revised in the last three years. I was graced with a number of friends and colleagues—yourself included--who were willing to read a draft and offer criticism. I believe the book is much better for this. 

I also have asked for retired status in the church. Living half the year in the desert in San Diego county has added almost another “life” to what we had before. It shows in Jeanne’s painting, now both East Coast and Desert works (www.jeanneplekon.com).

As for retirement, I still am an active scholar. I gave the Florovsky Lecture for the Orthodox Theological Society (OTSA) in America last November, presented a paper at the recent biennial conference of the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS), hopefully to soon be published. And I have been writing book reviews, at least a dozen a year, for journals such as The Wheel, The Journal of the Orthodox Christian Studies, Cistercian Studies Q, among others. I have been doing two different weekly ZOOM talks with discussion since the start of the lockdown. I am not bored.

AD: What led you from your last book, The World as Sacrament (which we discussed in this interview) to this new one? 

MP: Easy. The request to present at a conference at Loyola-Marymount’s Ecumenical Institute a few years back, then the collection of essays by laity and clergy I edited, The Church Has Left the Building, as well as several other talks, all led to the project of this new book. I place a lot of trust in the personal experience that shaped me and then leads me by the nose. 

I have since 1983 been a “worker priest,” that is a non-stipendiary priest at several Northeast parishes, Lutheran and Orthodox. I think the large parish at which I began serving and its parish culture and “world” now strike me as a time and world gone by. In almost 40 years I have seen so much change in the life of the parish—and that is chronicled in the book, also supported by a lot of research from Pew, and various institutes that study congregational life, as well as researcher like Nancy Ammerman, Nick Denysenko, Nancy Gallagher, and commentators like Andrew Root, Jason Byassee, Same wells, to mention a few. Also, the parish I last served had seminarian interns. So, following the lives of these young people was an important source of inspiration.

AD: Every author, I imagine likes to think the timing, the moment, for his book is just perfect, but yours really does seem that way, focused as it is on community, whose loss we have all suffered in the pandemic. How much did Covid change the shape of the book you thought you were going to write, and in what ways? 

MP: I have said, almost ad nauseam, that blaming everything on the pandemic is a forgetting of the state of things before the Covid appeared. Parishes were already shrinking, declining. We have been aware of the religious “nones” and “dones” for over a decade. All of us have written about the disasters passing as responses of the institutional church—to the sexual abuse situation, to so many “culture war” issues such as the status and rights of LGBTQ+ people, of people of color and immigrants, to Asians and Muslims. What was sick about the last few years was the legitimizing of open, explicit hatred and vilification by the country’s chief executive and a major political party. “Conservative values” cannot be used as an excuse for targeting, reviling, marginalizing so many. All this said, getting to the core of parish existence, to what is the heart of congregations, namely koinonia, community, is timely. That is essentially what the book’s about, an intersection of ecclesiology and sociology of religion, something Peter Berger encouraged me to do years ago.

AD: You mention how often "religion" is conceived of individualistically, and then the "communal core" of Christianity "eclipsed or forgotten" (p.3). What lies behind that--some of the factors leading to its diminishment into a private hobby?

MP: There are numerous sources of the eclipse of community, something that’s been studied and written about by Robert Putnam, the late Robert Bellah, Arlie Hochschild, and so many others. It almost has become an industry in social science. I doubt we have become significantly more individualist in the past decade or two. In North America, there has been a historical nostalgia about freedom, about rugged independence, with the cowboy riding off into the sunset, the notion that I am the master of my own destiny, that no one, either in church or government or the academy or science, can tell me what to do. This is myth. 

Likewise the notion that somehow various strains of Protestantism were hyper-individualist. When I hear Catholic or Orthodox blaming sola scriptura, the primacy of the Bible, or the loss of clerical hierarchy as the cause of individualism, I cringe. Some religious folk just listen to too much fake theology, inaccurate tales. And it’s not just Newsmax, OAN, and Fox News that manufacture their own news and facts. 

Everyone who’s ever belonged to a parish, whether as a child or an adult, knows how communal church is. I delight in writing about the liturgies, the prayer of making pyrohy, Easter breads, nut rolls, the second “communion” of the coffee hour and church suppers and post-funeral repasts. In the book I try to show that community is more than our warm feelings of friendship (as well as frustration and irritation) with each other in parishes. Baptism means incorporation into a people, the people of God. Eucharist requires communal sharing of bread and cup, concelebration by all the community, not just those ordained. And the weekday service of the neighborhood around is also a communal work of love.

AD: You show your debts early to Afanasiev, to whom my own work is also heavily indebted. Tell us a bit about his importance, especially for your work. 

MP: I have long thought Afanasiev’s work was wrongly overlooked and, in some cases, rejected. Anastacia Wooden’s recent dissertation and soon, I hope, book will show just how much Afansiev’s vision has been distorted by his critics, and how truly “back-to-the-sources” his work is. And it is not just Afanasiev as some “voice crying in the desert,” since it is a consensus of church historians and theologians that the church of the first several centuries was less constrained by law and clerical stratification that later on. Afanasiev emphasized what we find in the NT, namely that the church and the “local church” of the diocese and most especially the parish is intensely communal. He says, in the last chapter of The Church of the Holy Spirit, that the authentic power in the life of the people of God is that of love, not canon or clerical authority.

AD: One of the many valuable things about your work is how seriously you take the economic reasons for changing patterns of parish life. Tell us a bit more about their importance. In addition, I surmise from your wide and generously ecumenical survey of every Christian tradition that economic changes and factors do not care whether you're old-calendarist Greek Orthodox, gay-affirming Episcopalian, Latin-Mass-loving Roman Catholic, or anything else? In other words, nobody is immune to these changes?

MP: All the changes occurring to parishes are ecumenical, universal. It makes no difference whether East or West, nor the particular church tradition. Mostly this stems from the changes taking place or long ago having happened in the society, in politics and the economy and culture. Multi-generational families were the backbones of parishes. 

Now, mobility is the norm. Children grow up, go off to university, to marriage, family and careers and do not return home. Yes, of course here and there one finds exceptions, either due to ethic/language group or geographic location. But this intensified mobility is but one of the numerous variables at play in change in our lives. We no longer depend on a horse or wagon or our feet to get to church. Thus, many small towns, rural as well as urban parishes have become redundant. In Brooklyn NY, from a corner one could see perhaps half a dozen Lutheran church buildings, originally planted due to language/ethnic diversity. Now Mideast and Asian groups have replaced the Scandinavian and German communities. 

On a corner in Northeast Pennsylvania, the “coal region” from which my father’s family came, one could see a dozen church spires, half of them Eastern “onion domes” or cupolas, each established by an immigrant community from a different local in what is now Ukraine, the Slovak Republic or Poland. Then there is the transformation of the industrial revolution that drew so many to North America. In countless towns, the factories, mills and mines are long since closed, the industries totally changed or relocated. The cathedral-like parish church buildings remain, often down to 20 or 30 or fewer seniors. From sources like Pew Research, The Church Times, The Christian Century, US Congregational Life Survey, National Congregations Survey, Faith & Leadership, Alban Institute at Duke Divinity, Religion News Service, among others, I collected many examples, mini-case studies of congregations in transition. They represented most denominations here in the US and Canada. They tell of decline, shrinkage death…but also replanting, reinvention, repurposing of property--in short, resurrection.

AD: Your argument (p.34) that "A closer look at who’s gone, no longer in the pews, and why is a reminder that the decline of religion is no simple rejection of doctrine or ritual, and what is more, is not restricted to categories of age, education, political preference, or region" really complicates, if not destroys, simplistic nostrums that the way to hold, or attract, people is to offer, say, only "contemporary" liturgy or "traditional" teaching, "conservative" morality or "liberal" activism?  

MP: I listened to Kaya Oakes, David Gushee, Jon Pavlovitz, Andrew Root and others on why people are religious “nones” and “dones,” as well as the voices of those who departed communities of faith themselves. No church body can escape what they say drove people away—indifference to pain and need in the neighborhood, lack of compassion for the “other,” whether persons of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ folk, those struggling with emotional and physical challenges. The churches have, often enough, been their own worse enemies. A friend called their operating system “survival theology,” a desperate, and sometimes ruthless struggle to keep the heat and the roof on, at all costs. Or a retreat into an imagine past, or an escape into ritual or rules.

The most effective assessment of the sad state of institutional religion is to hold up the New Testament to the mix of introversion and obsessive thinking that passes for parish life. The riveting memoirs of Barbara Brown Taylor, Richard Holloway and Barbara Melosh, among others, force us to see the ugly humanity of congregations from pastors’ views. But what presents as unwelcoming, inhospitable, rigid clinging to the past need not be so. There are plenty of examples of parish communities taking the hand of consultants, pastors and each other to find a way to keep living forward, to keep living the Gospel rather than trying to merely stay open.

AD: Further complicating things, your section on location (pp.47ff) seems to suggest that merely because a city or region is growing does not mean that church growth automatically follows in those areas. What else has to happen for communities to experience new life? 

MP: Even in neighborhoods where unemployment, addiction, poverty, poor schools are the landscape, one often can find vibrant, life-giving congregations. This has historically been true for Anglican, Methodist, Catholic and other “inner mission” or urban mission movements. It used to be assumed that congregations that grew in the suburbs of the 1950s and 60s would simply continue that direction going forward. Now, formerly large, affluent suburban parishes are having to merge, to reinvent themselves, repurpose their buildings as the generations of parish youth moved away and more recent cohorts feel no pressure to join or even baptize their children. The “toolbox” of church is not in question. Baptism, eucharist, the scriptures, prayer, preaching and teaching and service. If there is something crucial, essential for communities to experience new life where they are, it is the Sprit’s prompting and their saying “yes.”

AD: As you move into your discussion about communities enjoying resurrection, but first having been "repurposed, reinvented, replanted," I'm wondering: was there one that stood out to you as the most unexpected or unusual reconfiguration that you least expected?

Several stand out, but one more than the rest. I will have an article in The Christian Century for September 8, 2021 about the story of Fr. Paisios, now Alexis Altschul, his late wife Thelma, St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox parish they founded, and Reconcilation Services (RS)--the amazing network of outreach ministries and service providers they gathered downstairs on Troost Street in Kansas City, MO. It made me think of the multiplication of the few loaves and fishes to feed thousand, this vision of a parish living out the Gospel. 

A former intern and colleague and friend, Fr. Justin Mathews is director of RS. A pay-what-you-can café is part of RS, Thelma’s Kitchen, remembering Presbytera Thelma’s feeding people out her backdoor. Employment counseling, therapeutic sessions, senior and well-baby clinics, are among the services offered. Even though the parish has now distanced itself from RS under a new rector, the reality is that RS has been born as a new kind of local church, a parish in which love of the neighbor dominates, much in the example of St. Mother Maria Skobtsova of Paris.

AD: I'm very glad you work in even a brief mention of "pastoral losses" (p.142-46) and the difficulties clergy face amidst so much uncertainty. I'm wondering if you know how well, if at all, such things are taught in seminaries? Are we training people to deal with the grief of loss of place, familiar location and routine, etc? And, in a related way, are Christians training ourselves to be less attached to buildings so that if we have to let them go, we can do so with more ease and less of a sense of loss? 

MP: I had to say things about the ordained ministry and the process of formation for this work in the book. But I was aware and explicitly warned that I could not do it justice—that will be for the next book. 

That said, despite institutional lethargy, uncertainly and fear, theological schools are beginning to experiment—while they too shrink, even close and realign with each other. In the UK half of all ordinands in training no longer go live at a theological school/seminary but do their training on site, in a parish, with a pastor-mentor. Coursework for the most part is remote learning, with summer sessions for encounter with fellow seminarians. 

Luther Seminary in St. Paul has adopted this model for a two-year M.Div. Others will appear. Bishop Andrew Doyle argues that the ministries we have—bishop, presbyter, deacon—need to be adapted to how we actually live and behave as church in our time. This means the formation process must change as well. Anyone who has dealt with the administrative apparatus of any church body, even now, knows just how resistant to adaptation and change these staffers and their culture are. But the ability of UMC pastor Dave Barnhart to develop a network of house churches, St. Junia’s parish, in the Birmingham AL area is a sign of hope and the possibility of change. 

AD: In ch.6 you write "I have changed my mind about small churches." Tell us what led to that change, and how you see small churches today. I'm assuming (given earlier rightly critical references) that by small churches, you are not advocating the kind of self-selecting faux-Benedict option communities certain reactionary and decadent bloggers advocate?

MP: Coming round to embrace small parishes for me has absolutely nothing to do with the Benedict XVI or Dreher/pseudo-St Benedict ideas of culling out the membership, waving goodbye and good riddance to the less than fervent church folk. Rather my view is one of realism: congregations for the most part will not be the sprawling post WWII, 1950s congregations bursting at the seams. The smaller, household size parishes will not be the “elect” the “select,” but those who can listen to the prompting of the Spirit and with courage find new ways of living out the Gospel. Also, “small is good” has nothing to do with the decidedly sectarian impulse one can now track among the Eastern Orthodox, some Anglicans and Catholics and others. Purging dissenting, perhaps too open, liberal people is not churchly, not godly.

AD: After so much change discussed in such fascinating detail, you quote Eugene Peterson's charming and hope-filled phrase at the very end of your book: "God...will continue to 'move into the neighborhood'.” That rather seems to me to be the pattern of the entire history of Christianity, yes? Knowing this wider history, it seems, is crucial for not succumbing either to despair or to wide-eyed romanticism about some magical solution for a better future. Churches of all traditions have risen and fallen--Augustine's Hippo in North Africa is no longer a major episcopal centre as it was in the fourth century, yet there are millions of Christians in other parts of Africa. Is this the pattern you see continuing as the century unfolds?

MP: History makes fools of us. Hippo is not the ecclesial centre it was in Augustine’s time. Diarmaid Macculloch teases, in his fine Christianity, the first 3000 Years, that Baghdad once was an ecclesial and theological centre perhaps superior to Alexandria or Jerusalem. Not so much now. There is something at once terrifying and exhilarating in seeing how much changed in one’s own brief life. I recall that, seeing some scenes of the HBO series This I Know Is True, in very small part filmed at my old parish. The emeritus rector was already there in the early 1980s in which the drama is set. I was also serving my first parish just a few miles away. But in the expanse of those year, how much has changed for both parishes, and for him and for me!

We really are fools if we think the church falls and rises with ourselves. I offer no recipes for parish resurrection in the book. I distrust church consultants generally. 

However, listening to those who found the energy to reinvent their parishes, to share their buildings with the surrounding neighborhood, thereby replanting and connecting to neighbors—this is the new life the Risen One constantly hold out to us. I have heard, a deanery meetings and the like, that one ought not drag Jesus or the Gospel into discussion. The presumption is that the bishop or the canons are more constitutive of the church and ministry. Seriously? Ever holy woman or man who sought to breath again the Spirit and live the Gospel knows better. We should listen more carefully to Mother Maria Skobtsova, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Nicholas Afanasiev, Alexander Schmemann, Sam Wells, Barbara Brown Taylor, among others.

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

MP: As I already mentioned, I believe I have to look at ministry, and in particular, the ministry of the ordained. I sense that there is a vigorous rediscovery of the priesthood of all the baptized now, even if that language were not used. Maybe discipleship, or like Bishop William Barber often says, standing up for God’s justice. But there is way more institutional encrustation with the ordained, many more models in need of reform, renewal, a lot of baggage that has more to do with social status, culture and yes, politics. Cyril Hovorun’s books are essential for tracking all the political and cultural use and abuse of church. I would also like to contribute some of my own pastoral experience while I still am able to write about it.

Many thanks for having this exchange and I hope readers will find the book worthwhile.

On Liturgical Dogmatics: David Fagerberg Interviewed

If you read past entries on here, you will know that I am an undisguised admirer of the work of David Fagerberg, whom I have interviewed previously about his many excellent books, all of which are worth your time. I have used his first book, Theologia Prima, in courses for some fifteen years now. 

More recently I have been recommending his On Liturgical Asceticism to students.

Now there is a new must-read book from him, and it really does belong on every RCIA reading list, and on the syllabus of introductory courses in Christianity, whether in a parish or undergraduate classroom. For Liturgical Dogmatics is, quite simply, that good. It has achieved the rare feat of being a book written by a top-drawer academic who eschews complicated jargon and an academic apparatus to write an accessible, cogent book that is not at all dumbed down but remains meaty and substantial from your first bite to the last morsel. 

As is my custom, I sent David some questions about his background, the book, and future plans. Here are his thoughts. 

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

DF: I am nearing retirement (another year) so I find myself retrospecting quite a lot. In 1988 I submitted a dissertation proposal titled “What Is Liturgical Theology” and I have been adding to my answer since, as though the dissertation was a small sculpture and I’ve been adding clay to the bust. The pathway to Liturgical Dogmatics was direct thematically, even if meandering biographically.

AD: What led to the writing of Liturgical Dogmatics?

DF: The books on the wall in front of me are about liturgy and Byzantine theology. The books on the wall behind me are about philosophy and systematic theology. They are from two different phases of my life, and perhaps this volume is their reconnection. I began with systematics, and was drawn into liturgical studies. It is nice to think that instead of those initial years being wasted, they have hung around to be put to use now.

I also answer this question with a short and true anecdote. I wrote the book in a second and a half in my mind; putting it on paper naturally took longer. 

I was asked once if I could teach the course in liturgical history one summer. I thought, “Yes I could. I would start with Adam and Eve as cosmic priests, talk about their forfeiture of a liturgical career, cover salvation history from Abraham to Moses to the prophets, arrive at Jesus as the High Liturgist, and consider the baptized Christian as his liturgical apprentice.” 

Then I realized I was only being asked to teach a course on the history of the liturgy. All that got me thinking that we might also do a liturgical triadology, liturgical cosmology, liturgical anthropology, liturgical hamartiology (sin), liturgical soteriology, liturgical Christology/Pneumatology, liturgical ecclesiology, and liturgical eschatology. These are the sections of the book.

AD: Your first book, Theologia Prima, has been out for many years now, and I've used it for over a decade in classes before also using On Liturgical Asceticism  and Liturgical Mysticism. How does Liturgical Dogmatics stand in relation to those other three? What is its unique contribution?

DF: There was no grand plan. I marvel at authors who have some multi volume project in mind from the start, but such was not the case for me. I was carried along the current of liturgical theology. The first task was to understand what Kavanagh and Schmemann meant when they said, respectively, that liturgy is primary theology and the ontological condition for theology. The first book was linking liturgy + theology as two words naming one reality. 

But I found that students and colleagues misunderstood, and I concluded it must be due to operating with a different grammar, so I wanted to thicken both terms: treat liturgy as leitourgia, theology as theologia. The Orthodox theologians of asceticism helped me with that. 

The ascetical dimension opens another door. Not only is it what capacitates us for committing liturgy, it also is a connection between the sacred and the profane. Robert Taft wrote, “the purpose of all Christian liturgy is to express in a ritual moment that which should be the basic stance of every moment of our lives.” So my previous two books (Consecrating the World and Liturgical Mysticism) looked at daily life through the lens of liturgy. And since dogma concerns the whole of Christian thought and life, it was time to look at dogma through the lens of liturgy.

Kavanagh referred to his fictitious Mrs. Murphy as someone who does primary theology. If I may say so, then, my books have been describing Mrs. Murphy as a liturgical theologian (though not of the academic variety), a liturgical ascetic (though not of the monastic variety), a liturgical mystic (though not of the extraordinary variety), and now I am considering her as a liturgical dogmatician. The dogmas that scholars talk about, she experiences.

AD:Already in your introduction you unapologetically introduce a term that, in the Latin Catholic world at least, is still being "recovered" as it were: theosis. Tell us a bit about the connection between liturgy and theosis.

It is like flower and fruit, pathway and home, tasting and seeing, work and beatitude, dawn and noontime, tabernacle tent and Solomon’s Temple. There is a foretaste of theosis in liturgy, but the discipline and rhythm of liturgy leads to the throne of God. That we drink from the river of liturgy (the reference to Jean Corbon is intentional) means we acquire a taste for deification. It brings us home. One of the sentences that fell off my keyboard said what I mean: “the liturgy is not the performance of a human religion; liturgy is the religion of Christ perpetuated in Christians.” Theosis is Christ taking up his occupancy in us. 

AD: The great liturgical historian Robert Taft of blessed memory often analogized liturgy to what happens between the outstretched fingers of Adam and God in Michelangelo's famous Sistine fresco. Is that analogy useful in illustrating your opening emphasis on liturgy as synergistic co-operation with God?

I found Lev Gillet’s definition of synergy to be perfect: “two unequal, but equally necessary, forces.” Both fingers must stretch out, but God’s power of grace is stronger than man’s power of ritual. So it is in sacraments: the human minister applies water and grace regenerates. So it is in liturgy: liturgy is a work of God, though it is an activity of man. (This is also expressed in scholastic categories of causation. Garrigou-Lagrange wrote, “one part does not come from us in the other from God. The act is entirely from God as from its first cause, and it is entirely from us as from its neck and cause. The first cause does not render secondary causes superfluous.”)

AD: I'm wondering if the use of "dogma" and cognates in your work won't stick in a few throats given common misconceptions of dogma as stifling, cramped, restrictive. Here is where I'm wondering if your work on Chesterton might be helpful. I often paraphrase him (accurately, I hope, for it's been a while since I went back and read him!) that we should see "dogma" as a bounded playground, as a free space where we can play at leisure within certain boundaries beyond which the Church simply says "Here be mines!" or "There be dragons!" Is that apt?

You have helped me fulfill my vow to quote Chesterton to somebody, somewhere, once a week. That is exactly his point, yes. “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making these old mistakes.” So he calls doctrine or dogma a sort of map of the mind; a guide to the maze; the key that fits the lock. Dogmatic teaching takes “the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice.” It allows for freedom.

AD: Perhaps more seriously, tell us a bit about the relationship between dogma and liturgy. The old tags about "lex orandi" and "lex credendi" have sometimes carelessly been used to suggest a monocausal and unidirectional relationship between the two, but it's more complicated than that, surely?

DF: I do propose a unidirectional relationship, but that’s because it’s a category mistake to treat them on the same level. Kavanagh thought we are misled by having ignored the verb statuat. “So long, I think, as the verb stays in the sentence it is not possible to reverse subject and predicate any more than one can reverse the members of the statement: the foundation supports the house.” Of course the house exerts weight upon the foundation, but the unidirectionality is expressed by Schmemann calling liturgy the ontological condition for theology.

AD: I'm struck by the care you pay to the great Orthodox Met. John Zizioulas in your book (as well as Florensky and others), and this, together with your long interest in and writing about Schmemann and others from the East, makes me think that while our liturgical practices differ very considerably, our liturgical theology, as Catholics and Orthodox, is very closely intertwined indeed. Is that a fair assessment?

DF: I would like to think so – agreed. I sometimes say that I can catch the scent of something in Eastern liturgy, Eastern spirituality, Eastern theology that I might not otherwise single out, but once I am aware of it I can detect it also in the West. 

Bowing down in docility to both the letter and spirit of the Second Vatican Council (from docilis, meaning “easily taught”), I have sought to obey the magisterium’s command in paragraph 15 of Unitatis Redintegratio:

Catholics therefore are earnestly recommended to avail themselves of the spiritual riches of the Eastern Fathers which lift up the whole man to the contemplation of the divine. The very rich liturgical and spiritual heritage of the Eastern Churches should be known, venerated, preserved and cherished by all. They must recognize that this is of supreme importance for the faithful preservation of the fullness of Christian tradition, and for bringing about reconciliation between Eastern and Western Christians. 

I want to avail myself of spiritual riches. I want to be lifted to the contemplation of the divine. I want to know, venerate, preserve, and cherish the heritage of liturgy and spirituality as it appears in the fullness of Christian tradition, and therefore I will look over the fence to pastures of the East. (I borrowed that from the opening of an essay I wrote for a forthcoming collection titled Mapping the Una Sancta, ed. Sotiris Mitralexis and Andrew Kaethler.)

AD: I'm struck by the creedal structure of your book: you start by reflecting on the conditions necessary for the "I believe" or "I know," move next to God, the fall and redemption, the Holy Spirit, the Church, and then eschatology. In addition, we get sections on angels and demons, on seven deadly sins, and much else, making the book seem in some ways ideally suited for, say, an RCIA program? Was that structure deliberate?

I looked at the table of contents of some manuals on dogmatics on the shelves behind me and noticed that’s the way they divide things up. If I’m going to look at traditional dogmatics through a liturgical eye, I might as well use their organizational scheme. It would please me very much to think I have made things more intelligible to someone in RCIA. They will have to send an email to Ignatius Press. 

AD: Naturally, while enjoying the whole book, I paid special attention to your section on ecclesiology, an area I have written about in my own books. Oddly enough I confess to relief at what is not here: any notion that offices and structures are worth your time! You say nothing about them and I'm assuming--correct me if I'm wrong--that this reflects the truth that offices and structures will pass away and exist no more in heaven, but that there we will always and forever liturgize?

Though I cannot find the quote in all the Schmemann material at my fingertips, I swear he is the one who said: “the Church is not an institution with sacraments, she is a sacrament with institutions.” That seems to speak to your point. I did not intentionally skip offices and structures: they simply were not the main characteristics of the Church to parade before my eyes.

AD: You open by explicitly eschewing footnotes, leading me to assume you are hoping for a readership beyond the AAR or the Society of Oriental Liturgy. Then your very clear style, and concrete metaphors and illustrations, make this an accessible book for a lot of people I suspect. Who was your imagined audience, and who especially would benefit from reading the book?

DF: What do academics do with dogmas? Talk about them, organize them, prioritize them, footnote them, write about them, systematize them, shelve them and take them back down again. But I suppose the thesis of the book is that Mrs. Murphy can experience dogmas. I’m not expecting Mrs. Murphy to read this book, then, but I do hope it defends her to the academic guild. 

AD: Having finished this book, what are you at work on next?

A couple times I have quipped that it would be possible to write a second volume of Liturgical Asceticism by using only Western authors this time. I’m going to give it a try under the title Liturgical Abnegation. There are Catholic spiritual authors that use terms troubling to our modern ears, terms like “abnegation, annihilation, indifference, resignation, mortification, nothingness, self-denial,” etc. The terminology sounds harsh because we hear it within a limited horizon, but it might be better understood if we could place the language against a more transcendent horizon. 

That transcendent horizon, I hypothesize, is the act of liturgizing God. Liturgical asceticism is a capacitation for liturgy; liturgical abnegation is a consequence of liturgy. Asceticism and abnegation are akin, but I look forward through the former at liturgy and am now looking backward through liturgy upon the latter. I do not gather my authors under any hard and fast temporal or geographical line grouping the authors, they are simply ones who have spoken about abnegation in a way revealing and provocative to me: Olier, Grou, Boudon, Rodriguez, de Caussade, Fenelon, de Sales, Libermann, Saint-Jure, Eudes, Scaramelli, de Granada, Ravignan, for example. 

On the Relationship Between Theology and Psychology

I thought I would cross-post this from my other blog as the person in question, Rollo May, spent his life at the intersection of theology and psychology. At least one significant period of his time was spent in Greece where he encountered Eastern Orthodoxy, though his writings on it are sparse. Nonetheless, he was a major figure who interacted with major figures in existentialist theology and philosophy as well as psychology. 

It is always melancholy for me when I reach the end of an exceptionally good book, but my consolation is that if I leave it on my shelf long enough, I can come back to it again in a few years time and enjoy its riches anew. This I will do with a fascinating biography that was melancholy for me in a second way: it took me back to a time when there seemed to be a closer, richer relationship between psychology and theology (as well as existentialist philosophy) than obtains in most places today. 

That relationship was lived by Rollo May, whom I first encountered almost thirty years ago as an undergraduate in psychology with a strong interest in theology, especially in its mid-century existentialist manifestations which I had explored in the last year of high-school when a generous French teacher (who very much saw himself as a soixante-huitard and thus indulged his contempt for rules and routine) gave me the entire semester off from class provided I show up on the last day in June after having written him a final paper on existentialism. This I gladly did, and so availed myself of the opportunity to read a lot of Paul Tillich--in English--and then Sartre and Camus in French. 

The following year, as an undergraduate, I read at least one of May's books as I recall: Love and Will. (I also read Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology by his half-brother, the psychiatrist Gerald May.)

May is now the subject of Robert Abzug's brand new book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May (Oxford University Press, 2021), 432pp. 

I finished this biography about a month ago on a lovely early summer evening on my patio. It is superbly written and a real treat to read. Abzug has an extremely deft touch in knowing how much detail to give about May's fascinating life and how much contextualization the reader needs without in either case overwhelming one with an excess of details. One would expect no less of so seasoned a scholar who is now professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Following standard practice, I e-mailed Dr Abzug some questions and was delighted when he agreed to my request for an interview about his new book, His thoughts are below. 

AD: Tell us about your background

RA: I grew up in a suburb of NY City, went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then to Berkeley for graduate school, both degrees in history. I was raised and remain a reform Jew by belief and tradition, though of course writing about May (and before that about 19th-century Protestant reformers) deepened my sense of the power of Christian faith and influence.

AD: What led you to writing Psyche and Soul in America: the Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May?

RA: I tell the story of meeting Rollo in the Preface of the book, but the short answer is 1) After having taken Erik Erikson’s course on the life-cycle in college, I began to have an increasing curiosity about psychology and psychotherapy, one that had already been reflected in my first two books but only as a non-jargony use of what I would call a psychological aesthetic. 

Also, while in graduate school, had taken an external seminar in the latest psychoanalytic developments at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. And, of course, being in the Bay Area between 1967-1977, I was in a culture awash with therapeutic visions of the world. That said, it was only the accident of meeting Rollo that I became interested in writing about May and, for that matter, seeing some of the history of psychotherapy and religion through the lens of his life. Of course, the experience of knowing him and his world of friends and concerns for the last eight years of his life proved richer than I could  have imagined.

AD: I first read May in the 90s as an undergrad in psychology who also had an interest in theology, especially the existentialists like Paul Tillich. Tell us a bit about the long-term and hugely important relationship Tillich and May had. 

RA: The early 1930s were key in setting May’s future. First, while still in Europe as a missionary teacher, he encountered, and I would say “converted,” to psychoanalysis by taking a seminar in Vienna with Alfred Adler. That put a certain shape on his spiritual quest but didn’t end it, and when he returned to the U.S. he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York. 

Tillich meanwhile had just escaped arrest by the Nazis by being invited to teach at Union, which he started to do in 1934. He and Rollo met early on in that year, and it began a relationship that was intellectual, spiritual, deeply personal, and lasted for the rest of Tillich’s life (he died in 1965). That relationship is certainly a central theme of Psyche and Soul in America. The mentorship of Tillich for May is clear, but it was something of a two way street. That is best indicated by the fact that Hannah Tillich asked May to deliver the eulogy at his first burial in East Hampton, NY, where the Tillichs had a summer home, and his reburial at the park named in his honor in New Harmony, Indiana.  

AD: May was also influenced by Freud, Adler, and Rank. But Adler seems to have been especially important. Tell us a bit about his relationship to and influence upon May. 

RA: Paul Tillich and Alfred Adler came into May’s life at a crucial period in his life, where his spiritual searching needed greater guidance and inspiration. Adler certainly had a life-changing influence on May, giving him a new way of envisioning the world and the possibility of a new profession. 

But Adler died in 1937, only four years after May met him and aside from a few friendly and important encounters in New York, the two didn’t really have the same sort of relationship as May did with Tillich. Nonetheless Adler’s ideas formed a compelling basis for his exploration of Freud, Jung, and Rank. 

But May told me that in the end he found other first generation analysts and later American neo-Freudians like Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm more powerful than Adler in their sense of complexity of the human condition and intellectual reach.

AD: You note (p.54) that May for "remained all his life wedded to obsessive self-scrutiny." That certainly comes through in your biography down to the last years of his life. What lay behind such an obsession?

I was about to say, “that’s a question for his analyst,” but let me give you two answers. First of all, I think his sense of spiritual devotion, which as it developed was truly a relationship with Tillich’s “God beyond God,” one which a therapist might call, insufficiently, OCD, made him investigate and judge his every action. This compulsion was historically not unusual among what Max Weber called “religious virtuosi,” and May was certainly of that breed. 

But I think more important was that he had the genius to build a theory of therapy based in many ways on his somewhat perhaps narcissistic but very productive contemplation of self. In short, these ongoing themes that provoked incessant self-questioning were in fact the well from which he drew much of his best work.

 AD: Part of May's project, you write (p.114), was "marrying the insights of psychoanalysis with the eternal quests of religion in a manner meaningful to the modern reader." Given how popular his books were, it seems he was successful in this endeavor in one way, but I'm wondering in another way about the kind of reception his books received in the professional psychoanalytic community. Did you come across reviews of and reactions to his works by psychoanalysts, and if so can you give us an idea of what they were?

RA: From almost the beginning, he saw as his mission in life the spiritual counseling of individuals, whether in the first instance through religion and later through psychotherapy, but perhaps most of all by educating an interested public through his writings. This was true when he first started publishing books that implicitly or explicitly saw a crucial interaction between the spiritual and the therapeutic (The Art of Counseling of 1939 and The Springs of Creative Living from 1940), the latter being a main selection of the Religious Book Club. It remained true even after he shed the theological trappings of Protestantism for a spiritualized existentialism.

Much of the answer to your question about his impact on therapists and reviews of his books is as much the ever-changing nature of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as it does with the specific contents of one May book or another.  

AD: In early 1940 or 1941, you write (p.135), May began an analysis with Erich Fromm. I've been re-reading Fromm for the last two years and amazed at how well some of his insights stand up three quarters of a century after his English-speaking debut. Tell us a bit about the influence of Fromm on May that you see.

Another very interesting question.

I think there was some influence, though some of the most important ideas about the world and culture were transformed in May’s work from neo-Marxist thought to existential thinking, for instance living in a culture where not so much through the transformation of society but rather the resistance of self an authentic sense of the world might emerge. 

Nonetheless, there can be no question that Fromm influenced May, especially in those early years of analysis before the post-tuberculosis restart of the analysis. And certainly, by reading Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, he got a new and materialist view of an idea that he was already familiar with from reading the late Victorians and conversing with Tillich: the notion that both faith and community had been in decay for some time and that these trends had deleterious effects on the ability of individuals to “be” themselves. In that general sense, May joined with Fromm and others of the postwar era—David Riesman, William H. Whyte, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others—each in their own way critiquing the conformity, consumerist values, and general weakening of individual autonomy.

AD: I sometimes wonder if the existentialist movement in theology and psychology alike has been largely left behind, but then you trace out the burgeoning relationship between an older Rollo May and a then-young and upcoming Irvin Yalom, who is still with us after an astonishingly prolific career. Tell us a bit about that influence of May on Yalom.

RA: As Irvin Yalom has said many times, it was his reading of May’s Existence (a collection of essays from European therapists) introducing an existential framework to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that inspired him to follow a psychiatric and analytic path. Later, when they got to know each other, I believe each helped the other in imagining the possibilities of existential psychology. However, there were differences. Yalom was a doctor, taught at a prestigious university medical school, pioneered group psychotherapy, was a self-declared atheist, and was a successful novelist. Rollo May was many things but none of those. In short, while they came together on existentialism, their careers and commitments were strikingly different.

AD: May's relationship to Christianity waxed and waned over the decades--from being a pastor and preacher early on to falling away it seems and then to returning to attending church later in life as an Episcopalian (p.331). Where, in the end, do you see May's life in relationship to Christianity?

RA: I think it is fair to say that past the early 1950s, at which point the formal church was no longer part of his life, he nonetheless lived a life imbued with the values he gained within the Protestant church culture and retained an abstract but real sense of what he called “infinitude.” His attendance at the Episcopal church in Tiburon in the 1980s had more  

AD: For those new to May and wondering where to begin, do you have, say, your top three favorites of his writings? What would you recommend beginning with for those who want to discover May today?

RA: My top three for getting to know May’s work would be Man’s Search for Himself (1953), Love and Will (1969), and The Courage to Create (1975), which is short, fits creativity into a vision of society, and as usual is clearly and compellingly written. And I would also suggest reading May’s introductory chapters in Existence (1958), an edited introduction to the possibilities of merging psychotherapy with existential thought. These are marvelous explanations of the power of existentialism. I might add that since the book’s publication, I have received any number of emails, some quite lengthy attesting to the influence May’s ideas had on their lives, and the three I recommended were ones that most often came up in our exchanges.

AD: Having finished this biography, what are you at work on now--new works in the pipeline?

I am still catching my breath but have thought about a short book based upon some lectures I have given recently about the practice of spiritual life in America, both in and out of formal denominations and traditional ritual practice. One element I wish to explore is the impact of religious and cultural pluralism on individual and group spiritual practice.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially should read it.

RA: Most of all, I hope to restore Rollo May’s place in the history of public intellectual life and, indeed, allowing readers to grasp the significance of his work to contemporary society and thought and inspire to engage with his ideas. As a biographer, I have also tried to write as “intimate” a biography as the sources allowed in order to provide readers with an account of May’s life that conjoins the public and private, as well as the unconscious and conscious—that is, brings an understanding that the origins of significant public lives lie in unique and often less than ideal sojourns. 

As for a readership, my hope is that psychologists open to a broader view of their profession as well as all who in one way or another were affected by May’s writings would profit from it. Yet, I also hope that those too young to know of Rollo May first-hand but who are in need of a broader and deeper sense of life somehow find the book and seek out May’s own attempts to offer roads to a richer life.

Married Priests in the Catholic Church

If you go here, you will be able to read a brief interview I did about my just-released book Married Priests in the Catholic Church.

In the weeks ahead, I will try to feature excerpts from the book, or discussion of its chapters, to whet your appetite further about it. In the meantime, the publisher tells us this about the book:

These essays offer a historically rigorous dismantling of Western claims about the superiority of celibate priests.

Although celibacy is often seen as a distinctive feature of the Catholic priesthood, both Catholic and Orthodox Churches in fact have rich and diverse traditions of married priests. The essays contained in Married Priests in the Catholic Church offer the most comprehensive treatment of these traditions to date. These essays, written by a wide-ranging group that includes historians, pastors, theologians, canon lawyers, and the wives and children of married Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox priests, offer diverse perspectives from many countries and traditions on the subject, including personal, historical, theological, and canonical accounts. As a collection, these essays push especially against two tendencies in thinking about married priesthood today. Against the idea that a married priesthood would solve every problem in Catholic clerical culture, this collection deromanticizes and demythologizes the notion of married priesthood. At the same time, against distinctively modern theological trends that posit the superiority, apostolicity, and “ontological” necessity of celibate priests, this collection refutes the claim that priestly ordination and celibacy must be so closely linked.

In addressing the topic of married priesthood from both practical and theoretical angles, and by drawing on a variety of perspectives, Married Priests in the Catholic Church will be of interest to a wide audience, including historians, theologians, canon lawyers, and seminary professors and formators, as well as pastors, parish leaders, and laypeople.

Contributors: Adam A. J. DeVille, David G. Hunter, Dellas Oliver Herbel, James S. Dutko, Patrick Viscuso, Alexander M. Laschuk, John Hunwicke, Edwin Barnes, Peter Galadza, David Meinzen, Julian Hayda, Irene Galadza, Nicholas Denysenko, William C. Mills, Andrew Jarmus, Thomas J. Loya, Lawrence Cross, and Basilio Petrà.