"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).
I'm having my graduate students this semester read a new English translation of the homilies of St. Basil the Great. That translation was published in the very welcome Popular Patristics Series of St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.
St. Basil the Great on Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (SVS Press, 2009), 111pp.
This book is reviewed in detail by the prolific pastoral theologian and Orthodox priest-writer William C. Mills (http://www.williamcmills.com/ ). The review is in the forthcoming issue of Logos, due in print by November.
The Romanian Orthodox priest-theologian John McGuckin, who teaches at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, both in New York, has produced an outstanding introduction to Orthodoxy in his
The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture (Blackwell, 2008, xv+457pp.).
This is an extremely useful and comprehensive tome, full of the first-class scholarship for which McGuckin is well known. It appeared in 2008 in hardback, and the publisher tells me it is coming out in paperback in November 2010 at a much more affordable price. For those who have only limited funds and limited or no background in Orthodoxy, I would recommend starting off with David Bell's book, discussed in an earlier entry. But for those who want more advanced material, McGuckin's book is definitely the way to go. Blackwell, in fact, has now published 3 of the leading introductory survey texts to Eastern Christianity with McGuckin's book, and then two earlier works: the Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity (1999) and the Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity (2007). Early next year, under McGuckin's editorship, Blackwell will publish a 2-volume Encyclopedia of Eastern Christianity. Given McGuckin's erudition and scholarly care, there is no doubt the Encyclopedia will be a major (if expensive) work that will receive sustained attention in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.
Greece has been much in the news lately over its fiscal problems, and the question is debated about whether it will default on what it owes or not. Interestingly, according to this long article, Greek Orthodox monks are playing a significant role in this crisis:
For those seeking an introduction to the role of Orthodox Christianity in Greece today, there is a new book out on just this topic:
Victor Roudometof and Vasilios N. Makrides, eds., Orthodox Christianity in 21st Century Greece: the Role of Religion in Culture, Ethnicity, and Politics (Ashgate, 2010), xv+258pp.
Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, Time magazine put Stanley Hauerwas on its front cover as "best theologian in America." True to form his reaction to it was "'best' is not a theological category." And yet if 'best' is not the, well, best superlative here, then surely others qualify: most important Protestant theologian today, most influential, etc. Of that there can be little doubt. My own life bears witness to this. I read every one of Hauerwas's works voraciously in the mid-1990s, and he helped me to see many things, and to change my mind on several important ones. He was also very helpful on a more personal matter, and for more than a dozen years we have written back and forth to each other, only finally meeting in 2004 at a conference in Prince Edward Island when we were both giving papers--he as a keynote speaker, and I as a lowly doctoral student. I remain greatly indebted to him.
In 2006, during one of our epistolary exchanges, he mentioned an article he was working on about one of the towering figures of Eastern Christianity, St. Gregory the Theologian (as the East calls him--i.e., Gregory Nazianzus). I expressed great interest in it, and he sent it to Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, and we were enormously pleased to be able to publish it in our 46th volume as: "To Love God, the Poor, and Learning: Lessons Learned from St. Gregory Nazianzus." I have my students reading that article this semester.
This year Hauerwas published his latest book, and one of his best. Most of his work has not been directly concerned with Eastern Christianity, but he has so shifted the discussion about theology, especially theological ethics, in North America, that no Eastern Christian should ignore him. (Again, as noted below, Vigen Guroian is one who is familiar with Hauerwas.) I greatly enjoyed reading Hauerwas's memoir,
Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Eerdmans, 2010), 300pp.
It is a deeply moving memoir, and I was hoping to write a long review of it for a journal but have simply run out of time to do so. Nonetheless, nobody should miss this book by a man who, though now 70, will, I pray, continue for many more years to reform the theological landscape of North America.
As I've argued at length elsewhere, the Armenian theologian Vigen Guroian of the University of Virginia, is a singular voice in North American Eastern Christian circles today. He has done important work in ethics, and much else besides. He is one of the few Orthodox theologians who is very actively conversant in many "Western" cultural realities, especially in the worlds of literature and political philosophy. I know of no other Orthodox theologian who has written on the novels of Flannery O'Connor or the ghost stories of Russell Kirk--or about doing theology while tending to his flower and vegetable garden. (I reviewed his book on gardening in the Journal of Canadian Orthodox Christianity in 2006. You may read that review here.)
The book is written in a "musical" way in six "movements" taking its cue from a tonal poem or a musical score. It is a unique way to introduce Orthodox theology which is, of course, never intended to be purely an "academic" or abstract "intellectual" exercise, but is meant, as with Orthodox liturgy, to engage many if not all of the senses. One of the most musically gifted people I know, Brian Butcher, who defends his doctoral dissertation on Wednesday (Sept. 15) at MASI in Ottawa on the topic of the Byzantine liturgy (in particular the Theophany blessing of waters), will review this for us in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011. And when Brian's own work is published, you can be sure it will receive the notice it richly deserves, here and in Logos.
Paul Robert Magocsi, a professor of history and political science at the University of Toronto and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, has long distinguished himself for his works on Eastern Europe, especially the Trans-Carpathian region and those peoples who find themselves there--Ukrainians especially. He is a prolific scholar whose work is widely hailed for its superlative quality. One of the many distinguishing and welcome features of his works are the maps, the usefulness of which it is hard to overstate. As I tell my students, before we all had cellphones and GPS devices, we used to use these things called "maps" and even, if you were really old, compasses also. I still use maps extensively in my courses because you simply cannot understand much of history, especially religious history, until you understand the geography. This is perhaps more acutely true in the case of Eastern Christianity than anything.
Among the many books that Magocsi has published, I was given this summer his
Ukraine: An Illustrated History (U. Toronto Press, 2007), x+336pp.
It is lucidly written and lavishly illustrated. It would be an excellent introductory text to those interested in Ukraine--undergraduates and general readers alike. Reading it, I was brought back to remembering the absolutely wonderful summer of 2001 that I spent in Ukraine, an unforgettable experience teaching, meeting people who would change my life (the Archpriest Robert Anderson, and the Mitrophoric Archpriest Roman Galadza, who persuaded me to go and was my guide while we were there), and seeing a country of such startling contrasts: enormous beauty, especially in Galicia where the Habsburg influence was obvious, and yet enormous poverty. As I said many times upon returning, I did not expect to find the Third World in the heart of Europe. And yet it was there thanks, as Fr. Roman put it, to the fact that the Soviets spent all their money on bombs and none of it on infrastructure or the people. Nonetheless, in Pochaev and the Kyivan Caves Monastery especially--as well as many of the other churches and monasteries of Kyiv--it is very easy to see why Dostoevsky famously exclaimed that beauty would save the world. I would go back to Ukraine in an instant.
Nearly 40 years ago now, the great historian Peter Brown observed that iconoclasm was a problem in the grip of over-explanation. Far be it from me to disagree with one of the most eminent historians of our time, but I am not entirely convinced by this thesis. Brown's article downplayed somewhat the uniquely theological factors in explaining the rise of iconoclasm in the East-Roman Empire. But he did help us to understand more deeply than we had hitherto the political factors behind the rise of the iconoclastic "party" and he also showed that the role of Islam was very much secondary and indirect. Other scholars before and since have shed further light, revealing just how much latent iconoclasm there was in orthodox Christianity in the first several centuries of its existence. Part of the explanation, it seems to me, lies in very legitimate, well-founded, and understandable fears on the part of some Christians that they had spent centuries being martyred for refusing the imperial ritual of "proskynesis" (lit. "kissing towards") which was a sign of obeisance towards the divine cult of the emperor. This was resisted as idolatry in refusal of which more than a few Christians went to their deaths. Now all of a sudden they were being invited to make this gesture towards icons, even icons of Christ? This was a bridge too far for some.
There was, of course, more going on than all this, even as iconoclasm remained--as did nearly all of the early controversies in the age of the Ecumenical Councils--a largely Eastern problem. The West did not know the same struggles, but that is not the same thing as saying it did not know iconoclasm, either in the 7-9th centuries, or especially later. It did and does. (I would suggest that there was a latent, perhaps unconscious, stream of iconoclasm running through not a few of those Roman Catholic terrorists liturgists who destroyed "remodeled" RC churches after Vatican II.) But iconoclasm in the West has not been studied very well until now:
Noble is chair of the history department at Notre Dame. This is a major work that looks briefly at Byzantine iconoclasm but concentrates on the same time-frame in the West. I will return to this book later, and it will be subject to a long review in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.
Apart from the Greek Orthodox theologian Stanley Harakas, and the Armenian Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian, there are too few Eastern Christians today grappling with the ethical issues, especially the bioethical issues, that confront us so frequently. While I lament this lack of attention in some ways, I am not entirely depressed by it insofar as I think far too much of what passes for "bioethics" must be regarded with a skeptical, if not hostile, eye. (As Stanley Hauerwas has said, bioethics as a discipline began when theologians lost their faith but wanted to keep their cushy academic jobs, and so began to push for intellectual respectability.) The bloated eminence of ethics as a "discipline" is a sign of deep cultural corruption and deep deception insofar as many assume that "ethics" is something only to be entrusted to, and performed by, certain "experts" who are supposedly "objective" in their assessment of these issues. One of the many problems with this approach is that it smuggles in all kinds of ideological assumptions. In saying this, of course, I am reflecting what Alasdair MacIntyre has taught us generally in his After Virtue (UND Press, 1984) and more particularly in his article "Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?" The Monist 67 (1984): 498-513.
One who has learned much from both Hauerwas and MacIntyre, and who shares their skepticism about much of what the so-called modern world takes for granted, is an Orthodox scholar too little known today: H. Tristram Engelhardt. Engelhardt teaches at Rice University and holds a doctorate in philosophy and also an MD.
Like MacIntyre and Hauerwas, Engelhardt is given to wonderful bon mots that go off like bombs in the face of the bien-pensants: "I am of the firm conviction that, save for God’s mercy, thosewho willfully engage in much that a peaceable, fully secular state will permit(e.g., euthanasia and direct abortion on demand) stand in danger of hell’seternal fires. As a Texan, I puzzle whether these are kindled with mesquite, live oak, or trash cedar. Being schooled in theology, I know that this is a question to be answered only on the Last Day by the Almighty." A new book has been published to discuss more deeply some of Engelhardt's ideas:
Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), vii+501pp.
This is a fascinating piece of scholarship about a relationship, and historical period, that are both fascinating in themselves. The book will be reviewed in 2011 in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies by the Anglican scholar Hugh Wybrew of Oxford.
The relationship between Anglicans and Orthodox has often been very close through much of the 20th century, though not always for the best of reasons--sometimes what drew them together was a common suspicion, disdain even, of Rome. Anglican-Orthodox chumminess went so far that it was thought--tendentiously--that some Orthodox had approved of and recognized as valid Anglican ordinations. That relationship is not nearly so close or amicable today, with the first rupture coming when Anglicans began in the 1970s to ordain women; more recent ruptures have come over Anglican departure from historic Christian sexual morality in their embrace of homosexuality. Today Anglican-Orthodox relations are about as strained as Anglican-Catholic relations are. An excellent discussion of those divisions was recently offered by Met. Hilarion (Alfeyev) here:
Peter Galadza and I collaborated on our own similar work on similar topics in the same time-frame in
Fr. Peter tells me my name was supposed to be on the cover alongside his, but the publisher screwed it up. No matter. It was fascinating research into the interwar period and Orthodox-Catholic relations as seen through the lives and letters of two towering figures: Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, and Lev Gillet, "a monk of the Eastern Church."
I have for years held Gorgias Press in very high esteem. http://www.gorgiaspress.com/bookshop/default.aspx They have an enormous collection of fascinating works in all aspects of Eastern Christian studies, and much else besides. One of their recent publications is
Kenneth F. Yossa, Common Heritage, Divided Communion: Advances of Inter-Orthodox Relations from Chalcedon to Chambésy (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), x+272pp.
The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has recently posed a deeply troubling question: why is it that “every serious ecumenical engagement between the Orthodox and Catholic communions reveals depth upon depth of substantial agreement, and yet always fades upon the midnight knell”? That question perforce applies, mutatis mutandis, to the ongoing efforts to find unity between the Eastern and OrientalOrthodoxChurches, a process very carefully detailed and analyzed here by the Romanian Catholic priest Kenneth Yossa in this superb and important book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation at Marquette under the Jesuit ecumenist Michael Fahey. This book is very cogently and lucidly written, and has none of the “dissertationese” or other weaknesses one sometimes finds in such texts.
Yossa begins with two chapters that tell the history of doctrinal definitions and divisions in the early Church. These two chapters are an impressive synthesis of a vast body of literature dealing with complex issues and a diversity of personages over the course of several centuries. This part of the book would function well on its own as an introduction to the first four ecumenical councils and their aftermath.The rest of the book is a survey of attempts in the 20th-century to heal the breach between the Oriental and Byzantine Orthodox. It is fascinating reading, but also agonizing: the progress has been incredible, and we are incredibly close to healing this division, but for some reason seem to be stalled right at the finish line.....
I rejoiced when I found David Bell’s new book. For I teach introductory courses on Eastern Christianity to students who are largely if vaguely Protestant, with a substantial minority of Roman Catholics making up the rest of my classes. Neither of these groups has any experience of Eastern Christianity, and so I have been trying to find the best introductory text for them.
Bell himself, as he recounts in the introduction, teaches a similar mixture of students, and he decided to write this present text. The result is a perfect balance between dispassionate scholarly explanation of Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and an sensitive “insider view” on the other. Bell, a much published professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and recent inductee into the Royal Society of Canada, is also a subdeacon in the Canadian archdiocese of the Orthodox Church of America, in which capacity he is helping to lead a new mission parish in St. John’s. His text avoids any hint of triumphalism or smugness, and he also avoids taking things for granted by clearly explaining terms and making apt comparisons. To do all this in a brief, cogent, affordable book is no small achievement.
The longer version of this review was published in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 50 (2009), available here:
Both of these books are part of the “Popular Patristics Series” brought out by SVS Press, which now numbers thirty-six volumes under the general editorship of John Behr. Both have been not merely translated by Harrison and Cunningham, but very helpfully and skillfully introduced by them. The compact size, affordable price, and the wisdom so lucidly set forth should all contribute to the success of these volumes.
Harrison’s text features a forty-five-page introduction to the life and work of him whom many Eastern Christians otherwise know as Saint Gregory the Theologian. Much of her introduction (which is largely biographical, but also features comments on Gregory’s Trinitarian theology and his theological anthropology) is draws on her own and other recent scholarship, including Brian Daley’s 2006 volume Gregory of Nazianzus, and John McGuckin’s 2001 Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Those readers who cannot read those two works (inter alia) for whatever reason will find that Harrison’s introductory essay does a very good job at giving an overview of the life and work of this towering Cappadocian, six of whose Orations are to be found here: the first (“On Pascha and His Slowness”), the thirty-eighth (“On the Nativity of Christ”), the thirty-ninth (“On the Baptism of Christ”), the fortieth (“On Baptism”), forty-first (“On Pentecost”) and forty-fifth (“On Holy Pascha”). A short bibliography rounds out the collection, as does an appendix which shows when Gregory’s orations are read liturgically in the Byzantine Church.
Cunningham’s volume also begins with a forty-page introduction which not merely provides very short overviews of the life of the authors whose homilies she has translated, but also deals briefly with the development of Marian feast days in the early Church, the structure of the homilies, the sources for them, and biblical and exegetical references and issues. The first homily (styled an “oration”) is by that of John the Damascene on the nativity of the Theotokos. Four homilies on the nativity follow from Andrew of Crete, and one by him on the Annunciation. Next, from Kosmas Vestitor (a “shadowy” figure who “probably lived in Constantinople sometime between AD 730 and 850” as a functionary at court and lay preacher) we have a “Sermon on the Holy Joachim and Anna, Glorious Parents of the Theotokos.” We have two homilies from Germanos of Constantinople on the entrance of the Mother of God into the temple, a third on the Annunciation, and a fourth on the consecration of a church under her patronage. From John of Euboea (about whom little is known for certain, including the spelling of his name and his provenance, which is thought to have been either Euroia in Greece or Euaria in Syria) we have a “Homily on the Conception of the Theotokos.” A short glossary and bibliography round out the collection.
Icons are increasingly popular today among all Christians of every tradition. I am teaching a course on them this semester. One interesting new book that has come forth from the Liturgical Press is:
This is a delightful book illustrating icons found in the Catholic Cathedral of Mary of the Assumption in Tbilisi, Georgia. In over sixty color plates large and small, the reader is taken on a biblical tour of the events of the life of Christ. Each event, including some one almost never sees in books on icons, is portrayed iconographically and then discussed in light of both the relevant biblical passage (reproduced in its entirety) and patristic commentaries on the same—as well as commentaries from the author, an Australian biblical theologian. Origen and Ambrose seem to be quoted most often, but others are to be found, including Ephraim, Augustine, and one who is, curiously, identified each time as Saint Evagrius of Pontus. Iconographers of the strict observance may quibble about details on a few of the icons, which perhaps lack in some ways the more ethereal touch of a Theophanes or Rublev; but in the main the whole book is greatly edifying—perhaps especially for some Protestants new to icons and worried about their relationship to Scripture.
Berger, an outstanding sociologist, has here gathered together essays by sociologists and theologians to consider the interrelated and uniquely modern phenomena of fundamentalism and relativism. Especially noteworthy is the last essay by Michael Plekon, offering “An Eastern Church Perspective from the ‘ParisSchool’ and Living Tradition.” Plekon rightly notes that fundamentalism also afflicts Orthodoxy in Russia and North America, especially among converts. He calmly and lucidly demonstrates that it is entirely possible to be fully Orthodox and fully tolerant of non-Orthodox without descending into relativism. Indeed, it is precisely the Orthodox position to affirm at one and the same time the universal truth of Orthodoxy and the universal freedom of human beings to accept or refuse that truth who is Christ. This is a very welcome and useful essay to have close at hand when next confronted by some sectarian “traditionalist” hyperventilating about ecumenism as the “pan-heresy.”
Our long-suffering brothers and sisters in the Coptic Church continue to amaze with their resilience and their learning in the face of formidable and often bloody Muslim opposition and persecution. There are at least four recent books that I have read about them.
The first has not received much attention at all, in part because it was only very recently published by a Coptic museum in Scarborough, Ontario:
That book, brought together by three scholars, viz., Marcos A Marcos, Helene Moussa, and Carolyn Ramzy, is entitled Marguerite Nakhla: Legacy to Modern Egyptian Art. It is a welcome book, not least because recent scholarship on Coptic iconography is not nearly as plentiful as it is for the Byzantine tradition. This new book helps partially to fill the gap, at least in English, by demonstrating that Coptic iconographical traditions continue to grow and develop in Egypt through such as, e.g., in Marguerite Nakhla (1908-1977), a pioneer of modern Egyptian art. This book brings together many illustrations of her folk art, her “folkloric” biblical paintings, and her more traditional—though clearly “modern”—iconographic work.
The book is exquisitely produced on high-quality paper with a myriad of lavish plates handsomely laid out, offering a feast for the eyes and mind. The authors have done a splendid job bringing this collection together and in contributing illuminating essays to it based on their academic and pastoral backgrounds.
Gabra, chief editor of the St. Mark Foundation for Coptic History Studies, has compiled this dictionary (with contributions from Birger Pearson, Mark Swanson, and Youhanna Nessim Youssef) largely because the valuable eight-volume Coptic Encyclopedia went out of print shortly after its publication in 1991, and is not available on the Internet. Gabra’s text cannot, of course, be as detailed as the Encyclopedia, but it does attempt to supply as much information in as succinct a format as possible, and in that it succeeds admirably. Most entries are brief, though a few (particularly those dealing with liturgical texts or topics) are longer and more detailed.
The introductory chronology begins with the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 bc but stops inexplicably at ad 1971, as though nothing significant has happened in the subsequent four decades. The introductory essay, coming next, remedies this by bringing the reader up-to-date on current issues and conditions, including the appalling descent into greater persecution of Copts by Muslims: “According to statistics compiled by the Center for Egyptian Human Rights, Muslim fundamentalists have committed 561 acts of violence against Copts since 1994” (7). The volume is concluded with a detailed bibliography of nearly sixty pages, helpfully organized by both subject and author.
The third book was published by an obscure Australian Protestant publisher. It is a brief, and not entirely satisfactory, biography of Fr. Zakaria Botross, a Coptic priest and apologist to Islam:
As I noted in my review in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, this short biography introduces us to the life of Zakaria Botross, a Coptic Orthodox priest whom some have called the foremost Christian apologist to Islam today—a role that has forced him to live in an undisclosed location from which he is nonetheless able to continue his Arabic-language broadcasts into Muslim countries, where, we are told, “it is estimated that in excess of 50 million people watch each episode” (145). His is a life of heroic suffering and sacrifice—along with the suffering of his wife Violet and children: bogus arrests and time in horrifyingly inhumane prisons; longstanding harassment and bounties placed on his head; and multiple abrupt moves to different parts of the world.
Robinson’s book should have avoided an occasional lapse into condescending Protestant editorializing and an irrational profligacy with commas. Moreover, his book could have offered a deeper examination of Muslim-Coptic relations, and also intra-Coptic relations. (A Coptic friend of mine from Cairo tells me Bottross’s broadcasts have had serious consequences for Copts there, consequences he escapes because he lives elsewhere. This does not always endear him to his co-religionists.) Still, for the time being, Robinson tells the story of a priest whose courageous evangelical efforts deserve to be widely known, and the trials and martyrdoms of his church more widely still.
Today it is no longer possible to consider oneself even reasonably educated in theology if one has not read John Zizioulas, a Greek Orthodox theologian of such erudition and influence that he is almost always introduced as “the most brilliant and creative theologian in the Orthodox Church today” (in the words of Kallistos Ware printed on the front cover of this new book). And yet, for many, it is no easy thing to read Zizioulas. I have wanted my students to read more of him, but have hesitated because he writes and thinks on a plane higher than almost any undergraduate today—and not a few graduate students. Now, however, we need hesitate no longer for here in this recent book, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, we have four lectures that make the last three decades of his theologizing wonderfully accessible. I have already assigned this text in two courses, and will continue to do so in the years ahead.
This text is very cogently written and smartly edited, and eschews tangents, footnotes, or other distractions. One can still “hear” the text’s oral provenance and imagine how thrilling it must have been to sit and listen to a master at work as he gave lectures on the nature of theology (ch.1), the nature of God (ch.2), the nature of creation and salvation (ch.3), and the nature of the Church (ch.4).
For some time now, Eerdmans has been commendably filling out what its publisher, William B. Eerdmans, Jr., calls “the Russian front” with translations into English of many major works of Orthodox theology. In doing so, Eerdmans has rendered a signal service to scholars and all others interested in Orthodox theology. They have been aided in this task by Boris Jakim and T. Allan Smith, both expert translators of theological Russian. I was recently asked to review the three most recent Bulgakov translations, and those reviews were published in the Wiley-Blackwell academic journal Reviews in Religion and Theology.
Originally published in 1990, the book has been reissued with a new preface, a new conclusion, and much new material throughout, reflecting the changed status of Eastern Christians in general, and Eastern Catholics in particular, following the collapse of the Soviet Union right after the first edition was published. Nichols, a Cambridge Dominican, is author of previous significant works on, inter alia, Maximus the Confessor and Nicholas Afanasiev. The present book cogently covers an enormous terrain of history and we see Nichols ably citing ancient and modern, and Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant sources in a half-dozen languages.
Eastern Catholics will be especially heartened to read the new preface in which Nichols says his main purpose in updating the text was to “offer a more robust apologia for the existence of the—sometimes but not always—distinctly minoritarian Oriental churches in union with Rome” (19). That apologia, offered without condescension, romanticism, or triumphalism, manifests an understanding of Eastern Catholics that is marked by more generosity and imagination than I have seen from any other contemporary Roman Catholic theologian. At the same time, he is sympathetically and respectfully aware of the Orthodox objections to “Uniatism.”
At long last, my own book is now in the queue to come forth from the University of Notre Dame Press early in 2011. It is titled The Roman Papacy and the Orthodox Churches: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. Watch this blog for further details!
Fr. Michael Plekon, with whom I had lunch in Connecticut in July, very kindly gave me a copy of his most recent publication, the newly translated biography of the extraordinary Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.
Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel is a wonderful book written originally in French by Olga Lossky, great-granddaughter of the famous theologian Vladimir Lossky. It has been skillfully translated into English by Jerry Ryan and very smoothly edited by Michael Plekon, to whom all English readers owe an ever increasing debt for his ongoing labors to bring Francophone Orthodoxy to Anglophone audiences via the University of Notre Dame Press.
The book contains a foreword written by Olivier Clement before his death in January 2009. It covers Behr-Sigel's life, which ran from the beginning of one century to the beginning of another--98 years jam-packed with incredible activity, first as a Reformed pastor, then a wife and mother, and then an Orthodox theologian who late in life became so renowned as to acquire the epithet "the grand old dame of Orthodoxy." She knew, and was known by, anybody and everybody of any significance in 20th-century European Orthodoxy, and many Catholics and Protestants, too, thanks to her work with the World Council of Churches. An entire cast of characters passes through this book, which recounts a life that itself passed through all the major events of the last century--2 world wars, the Cold War, the rise of feminism, the ecumenical movement, Vatican II, etc.
Behr-Sigel was an embodiment of the Christian East's love of antinomy: an Alsatian of Jewish extraction who spoke German, a Reformed pastor (the first such one in France) who tended her parish after becoming Orthodox, a faithful and long-suffering wife and mother who had an emotionally intense--but physically chaste--relationship with the celebrated "Monk of the Eastern Church," viz., Lev Gillet: all these wonderful facets, and many others besides, are told in this splendid book.
She was at once loyally faithful to the Orthodox Church but also open to the world and to other Christians. Her experience of close collaboration with other Christians in wartime France impressed itself deeply upon her, and she sought to advance Christian unity, especially between Catholics and Orthodox, calling for limited eucharistic sharing to spur us on towards full communion.
Behr-Sigel died in 2005, but we have not yet begun in any serious way to unpack her thought, especially on the still-controverted topic of gender. This book, I hope, will encourage others to know her more deeply and take her work more seriously, giving it the critical analysis it deserves.
The birthday of the Mother of God, 8 September 2010, seems as felicitous a day as any to start a blog, whose purpose will be to keep abreast of the myriad new or recent publications in Eastern Christian studies that continue to pour forth every year. "Eastern Christian studies" here is understood expansively to include not merely works in theology or religious studies, but also studies of the history, languages, and surrounding culture of those places within the Eastern Christian ambit. I hope to feature brief notices of new books in Eastern Christian Studies, with links to their publisher; short reviews of my own of new books; long reviews of my own; and then links to long reviews published in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, of which I am editor, and to which you are most warmly invited to subscribe by going here: http://www.ustpaul.ca/sheptytsky/logos/documents/Logos%20Order%20Form%20%20May09.pdf
As I am only one, extremely busy academic, I should be grateful for readers who use the comments to draw attention to books I may have overlooked or that they themselves think significant. I will not focus on books published in the distant past, but try to concentrate on those that have been published in the last 2-3 years, or are forthcoming from publishers.
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is a wonderful book written originally in French by Olga Lossky, great-granddaughter of the famous theologian Vladimir Lossky. It has been skillfully translated into English by Jerry Ryan and very smoothly edited by Michael Plekon, to whom all English readers owe an ever increasing debt for his ongoing labors to bring Francophone Orthodoxy to Anglophone audiences via the University of Notre Dame Press.
