Schmemann and Florovsky's Correspondence

I just got the new (and very thick!) catalogue of St. Vladimir's Seminary Press in the mail. There are, as you can imagine, all sorts of gems in it, but the first that leapt out concerns two pivotal figures I first read and studied in one of my doctoral classes almost 20 years ago now: Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky. Both are towering figures of 20th-century Orthodoxy, and both are always fascinating to read. 

Both men entered into a post-war correspondence that has just been published under the translation of Paul Gavrilyuk (whose previous superlative study of Florovsky I discussed in detail here): On Christian Leadership: the Letters of Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky (1947-1955) (New York: SVS Press, 2020), 416pp.

I am a great reader of and believer in the value of letters, diaries, and journals and the utility of all of them to scholarship. So I shall greatly look forward to reading this new collection, about which the publisher tells us this:

Fr Georges Florovsky (1893-1979) and Fr Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) profoundly shaped twentieth-century Orthodox theology. Their correspondence, edited and translated for the first time, provides a unique window into their theological visions, leadership styles, and interactions with their contemporaries. Most of the letters were written when Florovsky had recently moved to the US to lead and organize the fledgling St Vladimir s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, while Schmemann was still teaching at the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. The correspondence also reveals the circumstances of Schmemann s move to the US at the request of Florovsky, and offers glimpses into their subsequent collaboration at St Vladimir s Seminary until their tragic rift in 1955. Reminiscent of the style of Schmemann s Journals, the letters lay out the challenges of leadership with brutal honesty and good humor, bearing an eloquent testimony to their authors dedication to launching a new era of seminary education.

OCA's 50th Anniversary of Autocephaly

I have long been an admirer of the Orthodox Church of America, not least for its structures set up at and after its grant of autocephaly in 1970. In honour of that half-century anniversary, a new collection has been published:  The Time Has Come, ed. Ionut-Alexandru Tudorie (SVS Press, 2020), 464pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

This is a hardback commemorative volume, compiled in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Edited by St Vladimir's Academic Dean, Ionut-Alexandru Tudorie, the volume contains a collection of debates over the OCA Autocephaly reflected in St Vladimir's Quarterly (now known as the St Vladimir's Theological Journal). The various articles were written in the years leading up to and following the Russian Orthodox Church granting the Tomos of Autocephaly to the OCA (then known as the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America) in 1970.

Along with Alexander Schmemann, other voices found in The Time Has Come include Metropolitan Leonty (Turkevich), Protopresbyter John Meyendorff, Archbishop Peter L’Huillier, Elizabeth Prodromou, Archimandrite Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), Alexander Bogolepov, and several others.

Bless Me Father for I Have Lost My Faith....in My Parish?

Though I was privileged to read it in draft form, I was still excited last night to find in my mailbox a copy of Bill Mills' new book, Losing My Religion: A Memoir of Faith and Finding (Resource Publications-Wipf and Stock, 2019), 170pp.

It comes, rightly and justly, bearing a slew of impressive blurbs:

"William Mills has given us a true story told truthfully, a story of a faith lost and found, a story of the church at its best and worst, a story of a priest who persisted in his vocation in spite of everything. Service to the Body of Christ, the church, is not for the faint of heart and yet, in the end, there are blessings" (Will Willimon, United Methodist Bishop, retired, and Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry, Duke Divinity School).

 "William Mills has gone honest and intimate with us in telling his story of the travail of ministry. His drama of mean-spirited betrayal in the congregation and the late unexpected reassurance of support replicates our best story of crucifixion and resurrection" (Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary).

 "William Mills' memoir is a beautifully crafted, honest, wise, and insightful book. It stands in the very best tradition of spirituality--a writer and text that can speak to the real condition of the soul, and the day-to-day struggle that many have with belief. . . Honest and wise books on religious resilience are often hard to find. But this is one of those rare gems, and I commend it for anyone who knows how long our spiritual journey can be" (Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford).

"The Church speaks a lot about truth but isn't so good at honesty. Here is a priest who has learned the cost of this and who, with courage and imagination, encourages us to join him and to say it as it is. We clergy often know the words of religion but miss the music. William Mills calls us back to the vocation of trying to tune our lives to the harmonies of the eternal but only by recognizing emotional and factual truth and in pursuit of justice. Enjoy it and feel yourself defrost" (Mark Oakley, Dean, St. John's College, Cambridge).

 "Losing My Religion is the brave, tender, furious account of how William Mills is lifted, brought low, broken, healed, and made whole. As books about religious life go, it is among the wisest and most honest I've ever read. This book should keep company on your shelf with the better works of J.F. Powers, Larry Woiwode, and Thomas Merton" (Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk: Stories).

"The memoir is entitled Losing My Religion, but it is a testament to all that can be gained by remaining true to one's moral compass, staying honest and authentic, seeking to learn lessons in each of life's challenges. This is a passionate, compelling book, full of meaning"  (Judy Goldman, author, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap).

So you don't just have to take my word that this is a delightful book, and I'm glad to have the handsome finished edition in my hands to read it again and savor its humility, humor, and candor about the difficult life of parish ministry today. I will write more about it in the coming days, and arrange to interview him (as I have done in the past on here), but for now just wanted to note that if you count clergy among your family and friends, if you are yourself a pastor, or if you know someone contemplating seminary and parish ministry, then you must get this book into their hands.

Sex and the Canons

Last year at Orientale Lumen in Washington, I was on a panel with (inter alia) the great Robert Taft and Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church of America. Taft ended his remarks by turning directly to the metropolitan and saying something to the effect that "some of us are 40-year-long fans of the OCA" and expressing the fond hope it continue to flourish. I greatly cheered that remark. I gave greater expression to and analysis of my esteem for OCA structures in my presentation to the Huffington Ecumenical Institute's symposium in March of this year, which you may watch here.

Now the OCA has been undergoing considerable struggles for some time, and today further details were released about the resignation of Jonah, the shocking details of which you may read here. Some scurrilous nonsense has been spread about in the last two weeks by ignorant journalists and bloggers and this is unfair and unhelpful (to put it mildly) for at least two reasons, one personal and another more academic. On the "personal" front, I have known the OCA chancellor John Jillions for the better part of a decade and work alongside him at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. He is as fine an example of a gentleman-scholar and priest as I have ever known, and the idea that he would be party to some kind of politically inspired putsch is risible and absurd to all who know him.

On the more "academic" front, those alleging that the metropolitan was removed for his statements on homosexuality ignore the unanimous witness of the canons concerning clergy and sexual sins. Several years ago for an article I never finished I slogged through every disciplinary canon in all the councils--provincial, local, ecumenical, of East and West--that I could lay my hands on: one thing was constant, consistent, and completely clear in all of them: any hint of any sexual sin--including even consensual sins--of any kind, by anyone (perpetrator, "supervisor," or even victim) is grounds for permanent removal from ministry and perpetual ineligibility for any office in the Church. (The fact that some canons even say that boys who are sodomized by priests are themselves ineligible for holding ecclesial office struck me initially as rather unfair--blaming the victim--until I realized that the ancients knew what we only discovered about 20 years ago in modern psychological research: most victims of sexual abuse go on to become perpetrators, and even those who do not almost invariably end up deeply damaged and thus not ideal candidates for the enormous psychospiritual demands of pastoral ministry.)

Several studies of the canons, for those who are interested, may be found in the works of the Orthodox canonist Patrick Viscuso, including  An Overview of Orthodox Canon Law (Orthodox, Theological Library) and Orthodox Canon Law: A Casebook for Study: Second Edition. Also not to be missed is Viscuso's fascinating study--which I reviewed for a canon law journal years ago now: A Quest For Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress, An Analysis and Translation of Its Acts and Decisions. That congress was a fascinating affair, and Orthodoxy could have developed very differently if even some of the proposals from 1923 were carried out more widely.

An older, and not comprehensive, but still useful, study remains that of Peter L'Huillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils: The Disciplinary Work of the First Four Ecumenical Councils. Additionally, see the short little book of the Greek scholar Lewis Patsavos, Spiritual Dimensions of the Holy Canons. 
          Finally, a new study was released earlier this year, and is being expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year: Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington, eds., The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500 (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 356pp.

Counting Orthodox in North America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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