If you're not interested in confessional writing, you probably ought to pass on Winner's memoir-esque but not-a-memoir Still. It's raw and personal. Literary, theological, dark. It's also brave. As a professor at Duke Divinity and a recently ordained priest in the Episcopal church, Winner ostensibly has something to lose, spilling her crisis on the page as she does. Propelled into doubt by the death of her mother and the subsequent collapse of her marriage (which in hindsight she sees as doomed from the start), Winner doesn't so much disbelieve as simply run headlong into a blank wall. "God had been there. God had been alive to me," she writes. "And then, it seemed, nothing was alive—not even God." The chapters she writes in response to this surprising turn of events become her prayer, even as the desire and ability to pray desert her.
Winner thankfully keeps the details of her divorce discreet, focusing instead (if somewhat vaguely) on her contributions to the marriage's collapse. Anxiety, OCD, depression, and self-involvement all play a part, leaving one to wonder if Winner hasn't just run headlong into herself. Spin it another way, and Still could be dubbed a coming-of-age meditation. Winner's surprise at losing the ardency of her faith won't surprise the reader nearly as much as it surprises Winner herself—though few can write their way through as Winner can. Her responses to fear, loneliness, boredom and doubt are sometimes a mere paragraph on the page, but she blends erudition, humor, and candor to great effect. She may hide, as she says herself, behind a first-person narrative, but by the faithful work of liturgy, the sacraments, and (what seems to be a surfeit of) committed friends, Winner abides.
"...in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know. On the days when I think I have a fighting chance at redemption, at change, I understand it to be these words and these rituals and these people who will change me. Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze."
Dostoevskyan scholarship is as vast and varied as Dostoevsky's tomes themselves. Hosting their third annual symposium, The Eighth Day Institute is focusing the weekend's dialogue on Dostoevsky's "anthropological investigations into the human heart"---in particular, "his portrayal of humanity’s struggle to break free from the carnal realm of the demonic so as to ascend into a participation in the nature of the divine" (from their website).Guest lecturers include the inimitable Ralph Wood, poet and essayist Scott Cairns, classical studies instructor Martin Cothran, and Center for Western Studies Director, John Hodges.
Eighth Day Books will be hosting a reception and open house for the event Thursday and Saturday evenings respectively, with lectures, services and breakout sessions taking place at St. George Cathedral over the course of the weekend. Other events include a banquet for the Feast of St. Gregory the Theologian and an iconography workshop conducted by artist Anne Emmons. Click HERE for a complete schedule.
Deadline for early discounted REGISTRATION is JANUARY 11th, and registration is limited, so don't delay. Watch for information concerning the Eighth Day Patristics Symposium (February 15-16) in coming weeks.
Local author Clare Vanderpool (Newbery Award winner for Moon Over Manifest, 2010) will be our guest Saturday, January 19th, from 5-9 p.m. for a reading and reception.If you loved Moon Over Manifest, Navigating Early will not disappoint. It's a beautiful, multi-layered saga---a coming of age tale shot through with myth and quest, culminating in an unusual friendship and family reconciliation. It arrived in shop today.
Please join us beginning at 5 p.m. Clare will read from her new book starting at 7 p.m., and you won't want to miss it.
Though it may be true, as Rilke wrote in his Eighth Elegy, that "we never have that pure space in front of us, nor for a single day, such as flowers open endlessly into," Matthew Del Nevo holds steadfast to the critical human need for enchantment. Without it―and here Del Nevo in unequivoval―the soul starves. "The idea of the 'living dead' is not just a horror movie," he writes. "It can be a psychological reality." Touching briefly on the siphoning effect of big capitalism, consumer culture and the glamour-seeking masses, he singles out artists (film directors Chaplin, Hitchcock, Rohmer and Polanski, as well as independent musicians Jack White, Tom Waits and Tori Amos) within these industries whose roots are fed by enchantment rather than money or celebrity.But Del Nevo―a philosopher and professor at the Catholic Institute of Sydney―isn't essentially interested in cultural critique. His province is the cultivation of receptivity, namely through the activities of reading, listening, and gazing. The greater part of this slim volume dwells on the work of Proust, Rilke, and Goethe, with short excursions into the philosophies of Theodor Adorno and Lou Andreas-Salomé. In particular, his chapter on the erotic and narcissistic lineaments of enchantment, revealed through the relationship between Rilke and Salomé, points out the importance of melancholy. Del Nevo terms melancholy a "ground-mood" ("as close as possible or as imaginable to the experience of our naked being or to the intimacy of our solitude"), contributing not only a valuable dimension to the preconditions for "soul-work and soul-making" but also a welcome nuance to the meaning of melancholy.
These chapters are short, Del Nevo's voice indicative―but not irritatingly so. His interactions with Rilke, Proust and Goethe (as well as the correspondence between Rilke and Salomé) verify his thesis, that enchantment is a kind of work consummated best through vulnerable engagement. The Work of Enchantment is deceptively simple but not easy. Most fundamentally it is, in Del Nevo's words, "a stirring call to idleness."
Increasingly considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, Bakhtin is also one of the more eccentric. The Russian word often used to characterize his degree of otherness, čudak, expresses an extreme strangeness bordering on čudo, a wonder. When asked by translators struggling to decipher Bakhtin's peculiar usage of a familiar word, Russians have simply "thrown up their hands or shaken their heads and smiled ruefully" (from the Introduction), which is just as good a preface as any to the brilliant, if difficult, capacities of Bakhtin's work.The four essays contained in The Dialogic Imagination are primarily concerned with the novel, a genre that obsessed Bakhtin, to the extent that even his prose reflects the form— "an exhaustive presentation rather than [an] elegant concentration" (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel). Bakhtin was intimately concerned with language; his theory of metalanguage is extremely complicated, and must be (merely) mentioned here because of the way language is used in the novel. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Art introduced his revolutionary concept of dialogism—the way in which languages intersect and interact with one another—in terms of Dostoevsky's work. If meaning only emerges in dialogue, as Bakhtin contends it does, then the novel is a particularly potent and unique place in which meaning is not only internalized but also infused with one's own understanding. A collaboration and the essence of true communication.
The only history of the novel that takes into account these complexities is Bakhtin's, who viewed the novel as a kind of supergenre, "whose power consists in its ability to engulf and ingest all other genres...together with other stylized but non-literary forms of language" (Holquist). In this way, Bakhtin succeeds in forging a history capable of apprehending the earliest classical texts as well as medieval romances and folklore. Novel is "the name given to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system" (paraphrase by Holquist). The essays contained here — "Epic and the Novel," "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," and "Discourse in the Novel" — are complex and heady stuff yet at the core illuminate the novel's everyman's beauty, its "joyous awareness of the inadequacies of its own language."
It might seem that Resonant Witness is a book for the specialist, for the academic or the pastor/priest hoping to better understand the intricate tapestry of liturgy and worship. And it is. But it is also a book for anyone with a simple love and infectious appreciation of music (all kinds)—those "whose awareness of subtle moments of insight is well cultivated" and who are capable of eliciting or awakening insight in others (from the Afterword). The contributors to this volume all hold to the belief that the experience of music animates not only theology but also mathematics, science, and "the utter musicality of the world we are graced to inhabit" (from the Afterword).The notion that music, especially musical harmony, gives expression to cosmic order is pervasive in Christian antiquity and medieval thought. Essays considering Augustine and the French theologian and poet Philip the Chancellor reflect on music's capacity to reorient the soul to God, not only because it is beautiful (Augustine) but also because it makes abstractions sensorially perceptible and general principles plain (Philip the Chancellor). In another essay, the tensions between the musical and the verbal (manifest in the written and preached Word of God) within early German Lutheranism are examined, followed by a study of the incomparable J.S. Bach, who composed within that Lutheran stream. Other essays explore the "earthing" of music in the God-given arrangement of things and forays into music and culture, including music as a kind of secular theology, a study of composer Olivier Messiaen, and the modernist tendency to substitute music for religion.
The next section of the book turns away from an explicit study of culture and toward the impact of music on some of theology's most contemplated ideas and methods. Bach's musical treatment of death and intellectual engagement with biblically grounded theological themes is explored, as well as the thought of the "musical theologians" Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An essay on musical time and eschatology is followed by a study on the idea of interpretation as experienced through jazz and improvisation.
The final, and possibly most controversial, part of the book focuses on the emotional power of music. One contributor argues for music's power to emotionally educate and engage us with the life of Christ while another explores the distinctively female (and overtly emotional) voice of Hildegard of Bingen, who integrated music and theology possibly better than any composer or writer within the tradition. In a satisfyingly tangible conclusion, the last three essays consider the act of singing as its own distinctive contribution to the growth of wisdom and understanding, challenging the common relegation of music to emotional stimulation alone. Pervasive throughout all of these studies is the understanding that the relationship between music and theology depends upon participatory knowledge, offering "a potent (and welcome!) excuse for attending concerts, purchasing recordings, joining a musical ensemble, or learning to play an instrument."
The cardinal property of "the gift", according to Lewis Hyde, is motion. "The gift must always move...whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred." Hyde's rendering of this "economy of the creative spirit" moves in accord with the tenets of the gift. Folk tales and fables, tribal culture, poetry and mystics animate what might best be called a homily on the gift—a spiritual edification, not a doctrinal discourse.Hyde can't (and doesn't try to) escape the cyclical nature of his subject. The gift turns on mystery, its source being mystery, and "the passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies." He makes a fine distinction between labor and work, saying "that there are gift labors that cannot, by their nature, be undertaken in the willed, time-conscious, quantitative style of the market." Among these "female" professions he groups child care, social work, the care of culture, ministry and teaching. "The cleric's larder will always be filled with gifts," he writes, but "artists will never 'make' money." He follows this discussion with a chapter on usury, both fascinating and disturbing when examined in the context of modern markets and commodities.
Having illustrated his theory of gift exchange in the first half of the book, Hyde applies it to the life of the artist. Invocation and reception coincide with a certain self-emptying and self-forgetfulness "in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made" (Flannery O'Connor). Focusing on Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound (but summoning up Joseph Conrad, Rilke, Roethke, Gary Snyder, Coleridge and Neruda), Hyde examines their very different work and lives in terms of his theory. The Gift does not resolve any problems and is not a particularly practical book. But it is an extremely important one. A parable of sorts, touching on the boundaries of epiphany.
Where Western theologians are inclined to use definitions and dogmatics in the study of doctrine, Eastern theologians tend to make connections by way of paradox and symbol. Though perhaps less well known, St. Ephrem stands with the best of these (Basil, Chrysostom, Gregories Nyssa and Nazianzus)—a theologian poet of unique and estimable gifts. Historically, he typifies a meeting point between East and West, the one major writer who represents a genuine Asian Christianity "free from the specifically European cultural, historical and intellectual trappings that have become attached to the main streams of Christianity."Ephrem wrote in Syriac, a Semitic language and dialect of Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ), and while his work expresses a clear and carefully considered theological vision, this vision is essentially dynamic and fluid, defying systemization. Sebastian Brock allows Ephrem's writings to lead, extracting and distilling Ephrem's thought and relying extensively on extracts from his works. Brock rightly emphasizes Ephrem's aversion to definitions, who saw them as not only dangerous but blasphemous in their potential "to have a deadening and fossilizing effect on people's conception of...the human experience of God."
A scholar of Syriac studies, Brock loosely catalogs St. Ephrem's work as far as that's possible: the poetic nature of Ephrem's theological approach; his use of symbols in the divine descent of God to man and the human ascent to God by faith; his emphasis on the Eucharist as the Medicine of Life; and the primacy of the Bridal Chamber as image and type throughout his writings. Of unique interest is Ephrem's use of feminine imagery (as well as his "feeling for, and understanding of, women") and the value he places on the body as the physical location of salvation. Most essentially, Brock consistently highlights the astonishing nature of St. Ephrem's voice to the reader of sensitive heart:
Blessed is the person who has acquired a luminous eye
with which he will see how much the angels stand in
awe of You, Lord,
and how audacious is man. (Faith 3:5)
by Hans Boersma; 206 pp. paper $20.00
Much contemporary theology suffers "from an undue desire for clarity and control" writes Regent College professor Hans Boersma, creating divisions between biblical studies and dogmatic theology, between exposition and application, theology and spirituality. It is Boersma's assertion that "once modernity abandoned a participatory or sacramental view of reality, the created order became umoored from its origin in God, and the material cosmos began its precarious drift on the flux of nihilistic waves."A student of the Ressourcement movement (called Nouvelle Théologie originally by its critics before being reluctantly adopted by the movement itself), Boersma here puts forward a somewhat more popular (and affordable) account of his previous book, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, in an attempt to spell out the theological implications that Nouvelle Théologie continues to have (with an eye toward an evangelical audience). Namely, he advocates for a return to a theology of heavenly participation, which he clarifies to mean "creaturely participation in heavenly realities."
Rather than oppose nature and the supernatural, Boersma emphasizes matter's purpose to lead us into God's heavenly presence, resulting in communion with God. He sketches the contours of this sacramental tapestry--- "skillfully marshaling passages from the church fathers and medieval theologians" (Robert Louis Wilken)---and its subsequent fraying as a result of certain late medieval theologies and the Reformation. Boersma is sympathetic to both Catholics and what he calls "younger Evangelicals," but here he takes aim at the contemporary notion that links postmodernity with mystery, pointing out that "postmodern skepticism is something quite different from premodern sacramental mystery" and going into significant historical and theological detail on the matter.
The second half of Heavenly Participation wades into the work of reconnecting tapestry threads. A retrieval of sacramental ontology, maintains Boersma, must focus on Christology in every area of theology. The Eucharist makes the church a sacrament of the fullness of Christ. Scripture must be "interpreted sacramentally in the light of the mystery of the Incarnation." Maybe most significantly, theology is not a way of thinking but an initiation into "a divinizing participation in the Son of God." Boersma draws heavily from C.S. Lewis and Gregory of Nyssa in particular, as well as theologians traditionally associated with the Nouvelle Théologie movement---Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu. While the tranformation Boersma writes about is beyond the capacity of human language, he exemplifies the impact sacramental language has for reorienting our understanding of eschatological reality.
Up and coming in a city near you! Link through the conferences listed below to find out more: a patristic symposium on scripture, an inspired discussion of poetics and theology, and an art-centered exchange about keeping faith in the world. Presenters include the likes of Scott Cairns, Lauren Winner, Philip Yancey, John McGuckin, Patrick Henry Reardon, and our very own Joshua Sturgill. Even if you're unable to attend the sessions, stop by our traveling bookstore and get your hands on a real book. Nothing compares.February 15-16: Princeton Patristics Symposium: What is the Bible? The Patristic Doctrine of Scripture --- Princeton, NJ
February 22-23: Climacus Conference: The Poetics of Existence --- Louisville, KY
February 28--March 2: C3 Conference: Keeping Faith in a Messy World -- Nashville, TN
Trees, dogs, and arrows. Insomnia. Honey. Stone. In Benedictine monk Laurence Kriegshauser's poetic, forthright method, the psalms become the animated prayers they were written to be—"the voice of a humanity befriended by God." Put another way, they are "a vast temple in which God is worshipped. Each psalm is like a room...full of God's presence but not exhausting it. Praising God in one psalm we hear echoes of songs from other rooms." Father Kriegshauser inscribes these rooms with simple names, and it's pleasurable to read how each sum encompasses the whole of the psalm. Take "skip" (for Psalm 114):The psalm telescopes into a short hymn four events of the Exodus: the crossing of the Red Sea, the miracle of water from the rock, the crossing of the Jordan, and the establishment of God's dwelling in Zion. The name of the Lord is not used, nor is God mentioned until the end, as if to suggest a riddle behind the strange behavior of nature, a riddle answered only in the penultimate verse... the psalmist asks the sea why it fled, Jordan why it turned back, the mountains why they skipped like rams, hills like young lambs... The reversal of natural phenomena proves that Israel's God is the creator, who can make nature serve his purposes... (Praying the Psalms in Christ, p. 247)
This is commentary, yes, and it does the intended work of turning us to the psalms themselves. But Father Kriegshauser's exegesis is also the embodiment of fine writing, a nourishment like the psalms he obviously prays and finds sustenance in. In this, he echoes St. Athanasius:
And the one who hears is deeply moved, as though he himself were speaking, and is affected by the words of the songs, as if they were his own songs... Each sings them as if they were written about himself... so that in these same words the stirrings of our souls might be grasped, and all of them be said as concerning us, and they issue from us as our own words, as a reminder of the emotions in us, and a chastening of our life. (Letter to Marcellinus 11-12)
edited by Christopher James and Joseph A. Fitzgerald; foreword by Wendell Berry
249 pp. paper $19.95
Lord Walter Ernest Christopher James Northbourne's philosophy of farming is not the first to consider the relationship between people and the land, but he was the first to meaningfully place the idea of "organic farming" (coining that phrase) within the context of industrialized farming---that is, a form of agriculture reductively scientific, materialist, and mechanical. "What is remarkable, even astonishing," writes Wendell Berry in the Preface, "is that he was capable so early of a criticism that still is sufficiently complex and coherent."Lord Northbourne's use of the term organic is far more than a certification or label affixed to a half-gallon of milk. In the essays that make up this reader, he is most concerned with a way of life in which "business must serve and not override man's vital needs," in which "the things of the spirit count for more than material things." Because farming is concerned primarily with life, it "must be on the side of religion, poetry, and the arts." Because mechanized farming tempts the farmer to work on too big a scale and too quickly, it can be very unlike what farming ought to be.
His discussion of craft and art in terms of self-sufficiency and vitality constructs an important framework by which to understand trade. Northbourne's conclusions speak to commerce but also to the exchanges that define and enliven communities: "The livelier each of us is within himself the more he can contribute to the lives of others; real liveliness comes from within, not from without; it is the sign of that internal self-sufficiency which is vitality" (from "Farms and Farmers").
While some may not agree with his philosophy of tradition and hierarchy (Berry doesn't), Northbourne's "Looking Back on Progress" is an engaging comparison of the ideologies of progress and tradition ("their mutual incompatibility is total and unequivocal"). His discussion of sustainability encourages smaller farms, thereby increasing farm population so that "those who are willing and able to exercise individual care and responsibility and originality would have the opportunity to do so on their own land." Other essays include: The Problem of Pain; The Beauty of Flowers; On Truth, Goodness and Beauty; Decadence and Idolatry; Intellectual Freedom; Old Age; and an edited version of his correspondence with Thomas Merton. A paragraph from a letter to Merton typifies the gracious propensity Lord Northbourne applies to his subject matter---namely that the human soul is always of utmost concern:
"I question whether 'this technological society still has to be redeemed and sanctified' (Merton's phrase). God has destroyed societies for their abominations. But never refused Himself to a soul that has remained faithful. Therefore society in His eyes is a framework or testing ground; not it, but souls are precious. It can be sanctified...or not; but souls and not society are saved or damned. Living now is easy for the body and hard for the soul, in other times it was often the other way round; God will take this into account and not judge us too severely."
Recasting the educational philosophy of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric) as Remembering, Thinking and Communicating, Stratford Caldecott seeks to sketch out an education that enables "a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it." He defines a "liberal" education as "an education for freedom," necessarily underpinned (as it was in the medieval university) by Trinitarian theology.The Grammar of our existence is actuated by remembering our origin and our end. Having been led to the Father (from whence we came), we awaken to thought and seek the truth. Communication is done through the Spirit, "the breath of the Father that carries the Word." Caldecott writes from a Catholic frame of reference but emphasizes that he does not mean to exclude all but theologians and believers. If we aspire to educate children (and any number of adults) for being before doing, the theology helps us understand our needs and desires.
Beauty in the Word stays moves chiefly in the philosophical and theological realms, though toward its end, Caldecott roughs out his "creatively interpreted" liberal arts education for schools and homes. The primary curriculum (very much in keeping with Classical Curriculum) consists of five main elements: storytelling; music; exploration; painting and drawing; dance, drama and sport. Within these, three skill sets are addressed---religious education, seeing the form, and basic skills. His chapter surveying related educational philosophies and their philosophers (Vigen Guroian, Mother Cabrini, Charlotte Mason, and John Holt) lends an expansive, even ecumenical note to his treatise.
One suspects (and Caldecott says as much) a second volume addressing these particulars, but in keeping with his Trinitarian trajectory, Caldecott's coda quotes John Paul II:
The Truth about ourselves is closely linked to love for ourselves. Only those who love us possess and preserve the mystery of our true image, even when it has slipped from our hands.
Only those who love can educate, because only those who love can speak the truth which is love... Here again is the core, the incandescent center of all educational activity: co-operating in the discovery of the true image which God's love has impressed indelibly upon every person and which is preserved in the mystery of his own love.
The issue of biblical authority is tricky at best. As sociologist Christian Smith (a professor at the University of Notre Dame) puts it, "I am aware that the term 'biblicism' is often used pejoratively, as a disrespectful slight suggesting ignorance and lack of sophistication." He denies any "liberal" tendency on his part while pointing out that "slapping the 'liberal!' label on others is still a knee-jerk reaction of many evangelicals against any argument that on first glance does not seem identical to or more conservative than their own position." So what is his position? Namely, to persuade his readers "that one particular theory of Christian plausibility, reliability, and authority---what I call biblicism---is inadequate to the task" of being, as has been presupposed for generations, "the cornerstone to Christian truth and faithfulness." It simply cannot live up to its own claims.Growing up in the evangelical tradition himself (he has since converted to Catholicism), Smith understands the assets and liabilities in writing a book on biblical authority from his position as a sociologist and does not claim to bring scholarship expertise to his argument (though he has studied theology at Gordon Conwell and Harvard Divinity School). The force of his case grows through wrestling with a series of very simple questions and his refusal to settle for inadequate or standard answers. Showing first the ways in which biblicism is not a self-evident teaching of the Bible, he then identifies some of the "problematic, pernicious pastoral consequences for many thoughtful youth raised in biblicist traditions" (by this he means most evangelicals and the majority of American Protestant fundamentalists).
The second half of the book moves toward a number of proposals intended to, as Smith describes it, overcome American biblicism. Off-putting as this may sound to some, Smith does not mean to abandon evangelicals or evangelicalism. Rather, he maintains that "leaving biblicism behind need not mean losing the best of evangelicalism." Smith's hermeneutical key is Christocentric, and he thoughtfully encourages the faithful (meaning Christians of all stripes) to get more comfortable with complexity and ambiguity. Dropping the compulsion to harmonize scripture and learning to distinguish between dogma, doctrine and opinion anchor his argument. Instead of starting with a theory of inspiration, he looks to content and pays close attention to the ways the church has interpreted scripture for the last two thousand years (as well as the history of the New Testament canon's formation). Whether or not one is entirely convinced by the ways in which Christian Smith moves through biblicism to something more whole, readers will (as one reviewer put it), "benefit from this strong dose of realism about the way in which evangelicals actually interpret and appeal to the Bible."
As Eastern Orthodoxy becomes increasingly familiar amidst more mainstream forms of Christianity, reliable (and relatable) guides like Fr. Vassilios' Journey to the Kingdom provide trustworthy aid for not only the seeker but also those already immersed in the Byzantine liturgical tradition. In his opening paragraph, Fr. Vassilios depicts the Divine Liturgy as a journey. The Liturgy begins with the announcement of our destination---"Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and forever, and to the ages of ages"---though the journey commences with what he calls "the sacrificial act" of leaving the house, without which "there can be no liturgy."Journey to the Kingdom is rich with this kind of holistic understanding. In describing the tenor (and sometimes strangeness) of the Byzantine liturgy, Fr. Vassilios quotes Romano Guardini, turning one's sense of formality on its head: The Liturgy "speaks measuredly and melodiously; it employs formal, rhythmic gestures; it is clothed in colors and garments foreign to everyday life...It is in the highest sense the life of a child, in which everything is picture, melody and song."
The book is broken down into chapters based on the principal elements of the liturgy. In fine, Tolkien-esque detail, Father Vassilios includes a hand drawn map at the start of the book, marking these elements as in a landscape leading through the gates of the Gospel and the Holy Gifts, winding through the forest of the Creed, around the lake of the Mystical Supper and finally down the road through Thanksgiving and Dismissal as we reenter the world---the "liturgy after the Liturgy"---which the Church calls the work of the Resurrection. Journey to the Kingdom is as much an introduction to Orthodoxy through the Liturgy as it is a guide to the Liturgy itself. There can, in fact, "be no true 'evangelization,' writes Father Vassilios, "no effective 'mission' without the Liturgy. We cannot proclaim the joy of the Resurrection unless we have experienced that joy for ourselves."
October 2013 marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Eighth Day Books. In honor of the occasion, we are asking you, our extraordinary customers, to tell us what Eighth Day Books means to you. We hope you’ll share reminiscences, humorous moments, epic sagas, paens, poetic waxings and/or love letters to Eighth Day Books.Everyone who has crossed paths with Eighth Day---whether in Wichita, on the road, or in virtual fashion via the internet or telephone---is invited to contribute. We want to hear from brand-new customers, veteran shoppers, famous and not-so-famous authors, bloggers, former employees, sales reps, classmates and long-lost cousins of our esteemed founder.
We’ll publish as many submissions as possible in an illustrated paperback that’s scheduled to hit our shelves in mid-October. Please help us accomplish this labor of love by adhering to these guidelines:
750 words or less. Submissions may be abridged and/or edited for publication.
- Include name, address, e-mail and telephone for the author (and co-author, if there is one); no group or anonymous submissions.
- Please submit via e-mail, preferably as an attachment in
MS Word, to books@eighthdaybooks.com using the subject line “Anniversary Submission.” - Photographs and original artwork depicting themes related to Eighth Day Books will also be considered for inclusion; please submit in jpg format (300 dpi preferred).
- Excerpts from your submission may appear in our blog and/or Facebook page.
- Deadline for all submissions: June 1, 2013.
Please direct all questions and inquiries to Victoria or Alanna (800-841-2541). Many thanks !
The EDB Staff
"It has been said," writes the sculptor, typeface designer and printmaker Eric Gill, "that I am one of those writers who can only keep to the point by returning to it." In Beauty Looks After Herself, Gill ranges through the subjects of prudence, plainness, sanctification, architecture, sculpture, painting, machines and industrialism---all in relationship to art and the artist---to what end? The point he consistently circles back to is the artist as responsible workman. "I say he is a workman," writes Gill, "because his job is 'the well making of what needs making.'" Gill's prose is aphoristic, deceivingly simple. This is a good thing, because his words deserve a good chew, and small bites are better.You will hear strains of Wendell Berry in Eric Gill (better said---you will hear Eric Gill in Wendell Berry), as well as E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful). Like them, Gill should not be categorized a luddite, though he sees the shortfalls of machinery, industrialism and commercialism quite clearly. "You must not say you don't like this scheme of life," he writes in the chapter "Art and Industrialism."
It is quite inevitable, because no one wants to abolish machinery...the only alternative is the complete collapse of our civilisation, and nobody wants that. But perhaps that is what will really happen. Perhaps collapse is the inevitable end of a civilisation which has allowed labour-saving tools to be replaced by labour-displacing machinery---a civilisation wherein men, in thrall to financiers and men of business, have surrendered their responsibility as workmen.
After this dire diagnosis, he decidedly makes his case (with numerous qualifying asides) that the beautiful works of man are "evidence of mind. We make what we believe to be good---in accordance with our beliefs so we make." Rather than coming to the conclusion that a profound sense of form is all that is required for something made to be beautiful, Gill comes right out and says ("though our natural modestly makes us shy of such high phrases") that "all goodness in men is a reflection of the goodness of God and an earnest of man's godward direction, so all beauty is a reflection of the divine beauty, and...man's pleasure in things seen or heard is in fact only understandable when explained as a pleasure in what is in accordance with reality, pure Being, God Himself."
More simply put: Look after goodness and truth, and beauty will take care of herself.
by John D. Zizioulas; edited and introduced by Luke Ben Tallon---186 pp. $39.95
The theologian-priest John Zizioulas isn't particularly known as a concrete or practical thinker. Crucial and weighty, yes, but largely abstract when it comes to man's reality in the world. This collection of essays---published previously in both French and English journals or given as keynote addresses---does the commendable work of presenting a "provocatively concrete and practical" Zizioulas. As Luke Tallon also writes in the introduction, "a great deal of freight rides" upon Zizioulas' structure and theology of the Eucharist. Tallon has assembled a body of work that deals specifically with the Eucharist and its relation to the world---a very material Eucharist that Zizioulas assumes as foundation for his well-known writings on personhood, communion and otherness (Being as Commuinion, Communion and Otherness). Care has been taken answer critics who read Zizioulas as a "despiser of the material world" or an "existentialist in theologian's garb."Rather than introduce the essays with a series of synopses, Tallon emphasizes the way Zizioulas goes about the work of theology. This works well for our purposes too. In The Eucharistic Communion and the World, Zizioulas' engagement with scripture demonstrates a more patient exposition. While allowing the canon to form the context for interpretation, his "eucharistic-liturgical hermeneutic" opens up productive juxtapositions of the Johannine and Pauline texts. The practical implications of Christ as the "one" who unites the "many" emphasizes Zizioulas' claim that the local Church is the catholic Church, for "the presence of Christ in a eucharistic gathering means the presence of the whole Christ" (Tallon).
Ziziloulas' emphasis of the Eucharist as prayer for the Holy Spirit shows how the life of the world to come meets the Church here and now; the world must be transformed, not abandoned. This does not negate God's judgement of the world. The members of Christ's Church accept God's judgement as they accept the Eucharist, and within it, their shared death, burial and resurrection. They bring with them the world, praying and hoping for its redemption. In this way, Zizioulas' vision of man as the priest of creation---in relationship to our current ecological crisis---makes marvelous sense. This crisis, writes Zizioulas, "is due not so much to a wrong ethic as to a bad ethos; it is a cultural problem." Western culture has de-sacralised life, he continues, undermining the fact that "the human being is also, or rather primarily, a liturgical being, faced from the moment of birth with a world that he or she must treat either as a sacred gift or as raw material for exploitation and use."
What at first may feel like a dry theological survey of the Kingdom of God (the "Master Idea") in the history of Christian thought turns out to be an eminently practical examination of the "Christian experience with reference to the great twofold problem of life,---the purpose of God in guiding the affairs of man, and the supreme purpose---the summum bonum---which we are severally to set before us as the goal of our life" (Archibald Robertson). There is the issue of language to address here; it takes a bit of time to accustom oneself to Roberton's somewhat archaic, if not wholly Victorian, prose. The book itself is a facsimile reproduction of the original 1901 publication, lending to its "old book" feel. That said, the text is uniformly clear. One of the best such reproductions we've seen.Archibald Robertson---a Fellow of Trinity College, Principal of King's College, and later the Bishop of Exeter---emphasizes that regardless of the difficult and complicated nature of his study,"there can be no question that in our Lord's teaching the Kingdom of God is the representative and all-embracing summary of his distinctive mission." Christ taught that the Kingdom of God was at hand; the first prayer he taught his disciples instructed them to address their Father with "Thy Kingdom come." Devout Israelites throughout the gospels held the hope of the kingdom of God to be the goal of their life and effort.
Robertson's first three lectures address the meaning Christ gave to "the Idea," sketching out Old Testament antecedents, Jewish expectations in the Psalms of Solomon, the apostolic teachings of Paul, the preaching of Christ himself, and the enigmatic apocalypse of St. John---which Robertson names "the first Christian philosophy of history." Lecture IV deals with the eschatology of the primitive church, and Lecture V turns to the pivotal influence of St. Augustine, whose thought sparked the end of an epoch and the beginning of a new. Lecture VI discusses the subsequent attempt of the medieval papacy to equate the Kingdom with the omnipotent church, leading to the eventual break-up of this system (as examined in Lecture VII). Lecture VIII unflinchingly parses these ideas in an attempt to address the problems that confront Christians in modern life (including the moral aim of human society, the remedy for false individualism, moral earnestness in non-Christians, and the inherent deficits of Christian Socialism). Most strikingly, Robertson points out Christ's use of an idea which already existed in the minds of his contemporaries, an idea he "gradually untaught his Disciples...and taught it them again in a wholly transformed shape."
Those unfamiliar with Marshall McLuhan might be surprised at his continued reach and influence in an age of Twitter, Facebook and internet-driven communication. Together with Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, Eric Havelock, and Edmund Carpenter, he was a member of the school of thought that came to be known as the Toronto School of communication theory (namely characterized by the exploration of Ancient Greek literature and the theory that communications systems create psychological and social states). McLuhan himself coined the expression "the medium is the message" and "global village" as well as predicting the World Wide Web thirty years prior to its invention.McLuhan made a slow but complete conversion to Catholicism in the 30s while a student at Cambridge studying the Trivium and G.K. Chesterton. As a result, he spent the rest of his life teaching at Roman Catholic institutions. When asked by intellectuals and artists if he was really a Catholic, McLuhan would reply, "Yes, I am a Catholic, the worst kind---a convert," further baffling their expectations in relationship to his work.
While much has been written about McLuhan's theories of communication, very little has been discussed concerning his reflections on communications and religion. The Medium and the Light collects essays, interviews, scattered remarks and letters, giving us insight into his thoughts on the nature of conversion, the church's understanding of media, the relationship between liturgy (especially in terms of the changes made at Vatican II) and the media, and the shape of the future church. Letters to Jacques Maritain and Walter Ong (a student of McLuhan's at St. Louis University), transcribed conversations with the Catholic communications theorist Fr. Pierre Babin (The New Era in Religious Communications), and topics such as "Liturgy and the Microphone," "Do Americans Go to Church to Be Alone?," "Electric Consciousness and the Church," "G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic," and "The Christian in the Electronic Age" underline the question of the church's reality in an ever-shifting electronic age:
You have to remember that electric speed allows us to compress the entire year into an hour or a day. Therefore, in terms of distribution in time, the annual cycle of feasts no longer functions in the way that it should. At the speed of light, it has no more attraction. We want everything to happen at once, all the richness, all the feasts, all the Scriptures together and instantly. It is the same thing as having Christ right here in person.
Marshall McLuhan, in a conversation with Fr. Pierre Babin
Before Marshall McLuhan got ahold of him, Thomas Nashe 1567-1601) was considered the journalist par excellence of his day, but little else. A pamphleteer, playwright, poet and possible contributor to Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 1, Nashe wrote with a richness and deftness of style that ultimately led McLuhan to read him in light of the trivium. McLuhan undertook a systematic and remarkably comprehensive study of the theory and practice of rhetoric, grammar and dialectics (logic), focusing on the history of the church and its role in education over the centuries.For McLuhan, Nashe is a "fully enlightened protagonist in an ancient quarrel," emblematic of the history of the trivium itself---a history of the rivalry amid practitioners of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. To write the history of the trivium, one of these perspectives must be chosen. McLuhan, by way of Nashe (as well as Francis Bacon and John Donne), sides with the ancients of the grammatical school, regarding "words and phenomena as interrelated by proportions and etymologies" (Gordon in the Introduction). This view claimed McLuhan, influencing the whole of his life's work. After leaving Cambridge, where he wrote The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, McLuhan's enduring preoccupation with style as the salient medium influencing content was the cornerstone of his work as a philosopher of communication and media theory---the unmistakeable root of his phrase, "the medium is the message."
Previously unpublished (except for a short section printed in the journal Renaissance and Reformation Studies) and renamed The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, McLuhan's dissertation divides his study of the trivium into three sections---The Trivium until St. Augustine, The Trivium from St. Augustine to Abelard, The Trivium from Abelard to Erasmus---and concludes with illustrations of Nashe's use of allegory, hyperbole, paradox, metaphor and dramatic devices. Each section is prefaced by a short introduction by the editor. The index and bibliography are extensive, and the footnotes copious, providing an antidote to Samuel Johnson's complaint that
The reason why authors which are yet read, of the sixteenth century, are so little understood is that they are read alone; and no help is borrowed from those who lived with them, or before them.
---Samuel Johnson in a letter to Thomas Warton
Many, even most, people don’t quite know what to make of Charles Williams. An integral member of the Inklings set during WWII, he was a guest lecturer at Oxford---a charismatic lecturer with a devoted, almost cult-like following. At Oxford University Press, he began as a reader and ended up as literary advisor until the end of his life. He was mostly self-educated, having had to drop out of college on “financial grounds”; he was an unswerving member of the Church of England, with (according to a short biography by G.W.S. Hopkins) “a refreshing tolerance of the skepticism of others, and a firm belief in the necessity of a ‘doubting Thomas’ in any apostolic body.” Williams work includes essays, novels, poetry, reviews, plays, literary criticism, biography and theology. His most developed themes center on two main doctrines---romantic love (which he never fully defined but which most closely approximates Wordsworth’s “feeling intellect”) and the coinherence (“things that exist in essential relationship with another, as innate components of the other”) of all creatures. T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis were great admirers of his work, though even they confessed themselves “lost” from time to time. Eliot once remarked that what Williams had to say was beyond his [Williams’] grasp, and perhaps beyond the grasp of any known genre of literature. Yet it is Williams’ reach for the unknown and the unknowable that makes him not only a fascinating mind but also an important literary figure and man of letters.The Figure of Beatrice---236 pp. paper $29.95One of the most ambitious and unique interpretations of Dante ever written. Williams tackles the power of the image and the way in which images are integral to our relationship with God and others. Particularly, he examines romantic love as a “method of process towards the inGodding of man” as well as the images of community, poetry and human learning. Beatrice, according to Williams, is Dante’s way of knowing. “Wherever any love is,” he writes, “and some kind of love in every man and woman there must be---there is either affirmation or rejection of the image in one or other form. If there is rejection---of that Way there are many records. Of the affirmation, for all its greater commonness, there are fewer records.” For Williams, Dante inhabits the latter.
He Came Down From Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins---200 pp. paper $29.95These two long essays, along with Descent of the Dove (a short, idiosyncratic history of the Holy Spirit), make up Williams’ principal theological writings. Titled from a line in the Nicene Creed, He Came Down from Heaven is Williams’ study of the Incarnation, which includes discussions of his theology of romantic love and the coming of the Kingdom of God. The Forgiveness of Sins is, not surprisingly, a study of the forgiveness of sins using the Bible and, more surprisingly, Shakespeare, as his primary texts.
The Image of the City---199 pp. paper $29.95A collection of essays that run the gamut and include, but are not limited to: literary subjects (Milton, Pope, Hopkins, Blake and Wordsworth); works on the Incarnation (“Sensuality and Substance,” “Augustine and Athanasius,” “The Index of the Body”); the City as symbol of the Kingdom of God (“Anthropotokos,” “Church and State,” “A Dialogue on Hierarchy”); thoughts on Pardon and Justice (“The Cross,” “The Image of Man”); Williams’ rendering of the Affirmative Way (“The Way of Exchange,” “The Society of Jesus,” “The Parable of the Wedding Garment”); notes on Arthurian Myth (“The Chances of Myth,” “The Making of Talisessin,” “Malory and the Grail Legend”); and Collects Composed for a Marriage. Also included: a long introduction covering Williams’ life, chief ideas, and literary forms.
Though many laudable books have been written on the historical, liturgical, and theological meaning of Christian baptism, Robin Jensen's framework is distinctive in its focus on the sensual---i.e. bodily---particulars of the baptismal ritual. Material elements are diversely used in liturgical rites, and Jensen endeavors to show how water, oil, breath and light, as well as images, actions, and verbal recitation of ancient stories, prayers, and hymns "all contributed to making an invisible presence more palpably sensed. Every aspect of the sacrament," she continues, "aimed at bringing a transcendent reality to earth, where it could be apprehended through the bodily senses." Though rituals are local and adaptive by nature, Jensen underlines that they are also, ideally, timeless and changeless. She appeals to the reader's imagination. Rather than recreate a singular experience, she offers texts, images, and material data that inform and inspire a more complete understanding of the sacrament's complexity.Each chapter of Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity chronologically highlights a different element of the rite, beginning with its most ancient understanding as a ritual of cleansing. Drawing heavily from the tradition of typological exegesis, Jensen points out that "the efficacy of any ritual is certified by its antiquity, and because rituals are symbols themselves." Though she quotes numerous theologian throughout the centuries, one senses her primary reliance is on the symbols as witness---be they in the form of textual and non-textual illustrations, ritual processes, or ritual spaces.
This close attention to symbol shapes the whole of the book, incorporating the belief in baptism as a rite of initiation into the Christian community, a means to impart sacred knowledge, and a way to participate in Christ's death and resurrection through personal rebirth. Jensen's final chapter attends to eschatological and ecological hope for the restoration of creation itself. Her text is illuminated by black and white photographs of icons, mosaics, sculptures and baptismal fonts. Both the bibliography and the index are comprehensive and well-ordered for study. As one reviewer (a designer and consultant for sacred spaces) suggestively puts it, "The book will kindle your senses."
Illustrious writing groups of the twentieth century are famous for---among other things---the influence members had upon one another's work (think Bloomsbury, Transcendentalists, Brideshead and Lost Generations). Why then do most scholars, when writing about the Inklings, insist these writers had no influence on one another? To quote Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends, "It must be remembered that the word 'influence', so beloved of literary investigators, makes little sense when talking about their association with each other." Diana Glyer questions this conclusion by countering that "common sense suggests that these men would not have continued to read and critique each other's manuscripts if doing so had not been fruitful and influential. Common sense also suggests that the members of any long-standing group are bound to change each other."True, the Inklings themselves were known to deny mutual influence. Lewis famously proclaimed, "No one ever influenced Tolkien---you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch," and when Owen Barfield heard that Lewis had called him his greatest unofficial teacher Barfield laughed and asked, "What am I supposed to have taught him? He continues to deny everything I say!" But Tolkien was instrumental in the support and eventual publication of Lewis' Space Trilogy, and Lewis frequently wrote extensive critiques of Tolkien's work. A dinner conversation with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson generated an important turn in Lewis' ideas about Christianity, suggesting that "the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened" (from the Collected Letters).
Glyer's The Company They Keep grapples with the persistent claims that the Inklings did not influence each other and her sense that they must have. She's dug deep into the writings of nearly everyone associated with the group---Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, R.E. Havard, David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, Warren Lewis and others---and she quotes from each extensively. After discussing the formation of the community itself, Glyer assesses the ways in which they supported each other's progress through resonation and critique, the processes they used in editing each other's work, and instances of collaboration and mutual biography. She concludes with an appreciation of the role community plays in the process of creativity. Devotees of the Inklings will relish the conversation she recreates on the page, and anyone interested in the writing process or the impact of friendship will likely find themselves borne up into the still active collaboration of the company they keep.
In the words of Tolkien's Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, "By the labour and valour of many I have come into my inheritance."
Before and after the fourth century, Christians circulated varied texts that influenced their faith, doctrine, and worship, but which never became part of the canonical Bible. McDonald, a New Testament scholar and expert on canon formation (Formation of the Bible: The Story of the Church's Canon), provides an impressive overview of these manuscripts, moving from Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts to the Essene manuscripts and various writings circulated during the early centuries of Christianity. Along the way, he discusses the challenges of translation, the compilation of the Greek Septuagint, the rise of the codex, and canonical variations within Christianity itself (the Ethiopian church accepts an astounding 81 books). Particularly fascinating is his list of scriptural references from the sayings of Jesus found in the (canonical) New Testament.McDonald documents allusions to the Psalms of Solomon, Tobit, Sirach, Wisdom, Jubilees, and 1 Enoch, leading him to conclude that a fixed Old Testament canon was unknown during Jesus’ time. The early church made use of extra-canonical Christian texts as well (the Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Didache, Acts of Paul and Thecla, etc.). By placing these works in context, McDonald demonstrates that they broaden our understanding of the early Church without undermining orthodoxy or biblical authority. After all, “the Christians who emerged triumphant in the church…were those whose message most closely reflected the story and teachings of Jesus in the four Gospels and in the letters of Paul.”
by Christine D. Pohl---205 pp. paper $20.00
"If there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential," writes Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, "it is the concept of hospitality." Shaped by the many communities she has served and researched (L'Abri, Annunciation House, L'Arche, The Catholic Worker, The Open Door and St. John's and St. Benedict's monasteries), Christine Pohl is especially qualified to write about the recovery of an ancient practice of hospitality that has virtually disappeared as a result of shifts in the structure of the church, the nature of the family household, and the ever-expanding commercialization of society.Marrying historical research with contemporary material culled from observation, personal practice and interviews, Pohl examines hospitality as a theological concept embodied in practice. "Hospitable attitudes...do not challenge us or transform our loyalties in the way that actual hospitality to particular strangers does," writes Pohl. "Hospitality in the abstract lacks the mundane, troublesome, yet rich dimensions of a profound human practice."
Attending to "good stories, wise mentors, and hard questions," Making Room dwells in ancient tradition and biblical sources. Pohl begins with the Christian heritage of hospitality, giving a short history and drawing a picture of the practice via the writings of John Chrysostom, Lactantius (tutor to the son of Constantine), Jerome and John Wesley, as well as Old Testament prophets and the parables of Jesus. In the second section of the book, she seeks to restore hospitality's edge, it's "subversive, countercultural dimension." As one Catholic Worker puts it, "Hospitality is resistance," pointing to a different system of valuing and an alternate model of relationships.
Pohl finishes the book with a consideration of the limits, temptations and boundaries of hospitality. "Hospitality is simultaneously mundane and sturdy, mysterious and fragile," she writes, "vulnerable to distortion and misuse." Focusing on intentional communities oriented toward hospitality as a way of life, she shows the many facets of hospitality and emphasizes the need for renewing rhythms of work, rest and worship. Hospitality is a gift, but it is also a skill that must be practiced. If it cannot be sustained, it is, to quote a Franciscan prior, "not worth us being here. Our job is to stay."
Series Editors: Lester Ruth, Carrie Steenwyk, John D. WitvlietWhereas many historical studies of church worship provide the reader with a sweeping view of changing practices throughout centuries, The Church at Worship series has chosen to skip the forest for the trees, zooming in "close to the surface, lingering over worship practices in a single time and place and allowing readers to sense the texture of specific worship practices in unique Christian communities" (from the series introduction). Each volume begins with a specific period placed within the larger context of changing views and developments. Maps, a timeline of events, and a summary of significant aspects of worship within the time period being studied launch each volume as well as a list of "necessary cautions" and important themes and practices to watch for while reading.
Rather than focusing solely on the perspective of what the clergy did, said, and thought, The Church at Worship concentrates on the nature of participation for the entire community, and ordinary worshipers in particular. Primary sources are central, and some categories include people and artifacts, worship setting and description, orders of worship and texts, sermons, polity documents and theology-of-worship texts. Each source is introduced and accompanied by explanatory notes, allowing readers of all stripes access to primary materials.
A word about the format: at first glance the book looks like a study guide for small group or personal study. And it is. The books themselves are more square than rectangular in shape, and the text is widely spaced, lending a roominess to its substantial content. That said, this series is no lightweight summary or watered-down commentary. The Church at Worship successfully merges academic rigor and accessibility. Researchers and students are led to the best scholarly editions of the sources presented while congregational study groups are given the opportunity to reflectively interact with the practices of the church entire. Suggestions for devotional use, discussion questions for small groups, and a guide for different disciplines and areas of interest conclude each study.
In his book Why Study the Past?, Rowan Williams makes a compelling case for the importance of church history. While there is "a sameness in the work of God....We are not the first to walk this way; run your hand down the wood and the grain is still the same." And yet, "Good history makes us think again about the definition of things we thought we understood...because it engages not just with what is familiar but with what is strange. It recognizes that the past is a foreign country as well as being our past."
Walking Where Jesus Walked: Worship in Fourth-Century Jerusalemedited by Lester Ruth, Carrie Steenwyk, and John D. Witvliet---184 pp. paper $23.00
The inaugural volume in The Church at Worship series concentrates on fourth-century Jerusalem, a holy site of pilgrimage not only for Christians but also Jews and Muslims. A place of renewal, Jerusalem has historically been an arena of controversy and tension. The Jewish population (including Jewish Christians) was banned from the city by the emperor Hadrian in the second century, and it wasn't until the fourth century---with the rise of the emperor Constantine and the subsequent excavation of Jesus' tomb and the site of his crucifixion---that Christian pilgrims were able to return (in droves). The services held at the various holy sites, incorporated with the practices the pilgrims brought with them, profoundly impacted the look and feel of Christian worship for centuries to come. Documents included in this volume: representations of Constantine and his mother Helena; an imperial edict and early map of Jerusalem; drawings and diagrams of the Holy Sepulcher, the Rotunda of the Anastasis, and the worship space over Christ's tomb; descriptions of worship taken from the pilgrim Egeria's diary; the Liturgy of St. James; likely scripture readings and communion prayers of the time; and excerpts from the sermons of St. Cyril on the story of the paralytic by the pool, Lent and the catechetical instruction of baptismal candidates.Tasting Heaven on Earth: Worship in Sixth-Century Constantinopleedited by Walter D. Ray---158 pp. paper $28.00
Fast-forward two centuries past Constantine's excavation of Jerusalem and his inauguration of Constantinople as the Christian capital of the world. Responsible for the proper ordering of the church, reigning emperors often stirred up doctrinal controversy within the church. In an effort to promote church unity, Constantine called the Council of Nicea in 325 to deal with the question of Christ's divinity. By the sixth century, councils had been held at both Ephesus and Chalcedon to affirm the identity of Mary as the Theotokos ("God-bearer") and to more accurately express the human and divine natures of God. Because the church of Constantinople was known as the church of the emperor, it profoundly influenced the rites and worship of the church undivided and eventually supplanted the forms of worship in the Eastern churches in communion with it. The liturgy that emerged from sixth-century Constantinople remains, in essence, the rite of Eastern Orthodox churches today. Tasting Heaven on Earth is, in theologian Vigen Guroian's words, "a kind of museum in print that makes tangible to readers the lived faith of this ancient Christian culture." Mosaics from Hagia Sophia, liturgical vessels, icons, manuscripts and frescos document the people and artifacts from this century, and drawings of early Constantinople as well as the interior and exterior of Hagia Sophia illustrate the worship setting and space. Descriptions of worship by Eutychius, Procopius and Paul the Silentiary precede a reconstruction of the Liturgy of St. Basil and two prayers of consecration. Sermons that demonstrate the nature of Byzantine piety and the church's understanding of baptism (penned by Romanos) accompany a Pentecost sermon and two decrees made by Emperor Justinian.
So much talk (and reading and writing) these days about the ways in which the internet and technology affect communication and the brain. Let's switch gears. Ward Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric is---to quote one reviewer---an affirmation that "despite the confusion of the present technological age, human nature, and our ability to communicate in clear and often beautiful ways, are unchanging" (Victor Davis Hanson). These ways, as too many of us often forget or never realize, can be studied. They are practical techniques for working with large aesthetic principles---"repetition and variety, suspense and relief, concealment and surprise, the creation of expectations and then the satisfaction or frustration of them"---that not only persuade or move an audience but also make for beautiful sentences and paragraphs. Ward Farnsworth, a professor of law at Boston University School of Law, adheres to the rhetorical school of example but advises that their use must be voluminous. "Seeing just a few examples invites direct imitation of them, which tends to be clumsy. Immersion in many examples allows them to do their work by way of a subtler process of influence, with a gentler and happier effect on the resulting style."Farnsworth's book contains more than a thousand illustrations drawn from British, Irish and American oratory and literature. The obvious greats are here---Lincoln, Churchill, Dickens, Melville, Shaw, Chesterton, Shakespeare, Twain and Emerson---and making their acquaintance in this format is "the fun of studying their craft." The classical in Farnsworth's title references a tradition outside of living memory that is fast becoming more distant as a cultural and stylistic matter. Farnsworth chooses eighteen of what he considers to be the most practical rhetorical figures for study, omitting metaphor and simile ("large enough topics to require separate treatment") as well as anything translated into English (excepting the King James Bible). Chapters begin with the Ancient Greek or occasionally Latin name for the device being illustrated followed by a short introduction to the concept. Then we're off! Helpful interjections are periodically made between examples to underscore or break down a figure's effect, thereby expanding the understanding of its use. To our eye, the only thing missing is an index, though the book's layout makes it relatively easy to locate particular authors, which are offset to the margins and followed by the text from which the quotation was taken as well as its year of publication.
The study of these figures, one can only hope, will rescue us from the sad fate of the poor creature described by Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying (employing the use of litotes---a rhetorical use of the negative): "As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate."
Ecclesiastical law may not be at the top of everyone's reading list, but The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500 is the first book of its kind in any language to offer the curious mind a foray into the ironies and linguistic complexities of canon law and liturgical practice in their earliest manifestations. Its four authors, over the course of five substantive chapters, present a well-researched and carefully referenced history tuned for the scholar but accessible to anyone interested in early church practice and formation.In Chapter One, Susan Wessel first deciphers then weaves together the impact of various early church documents (Clement of Rome's Epistle to the Corinthians, the letters of Ignatius, the Greek Didache and Syriac Didascalia, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas) on the eventual coalescence of ecclesiastical law. Particularly interesting is the relationship between the Torah and the early church and the assertion that "an abstract set of ecclesiastical laws was never imposed upon the incipient communities; rather, liturgical practices that were already recognized as traditional were gradually given the force of normative law." Legitimacy came through practice, and ritual was a means through which the Church protected herself from heresy.
With the onset of the early church councils, the authority of these earliest documents receded in favor of a more democratic model of church organization. Bishops from various regions came together to slowly formalize church organization and norms of behavior for clergy and laity. In Chapter Two, Heinz Ohme treats the sources of canonical material of Byzantine canon law through the so-called Quinisext Council (692). Ohme notes that while this council did not bring the development of canon law in the Byzantine East to a close, the canon that emerged was the first to list and authorize the all of the previous canons. He outlines and briefly discusses the Canons of the Apostles (a collection of 85 canons), the Quinisext and eleven synods prior, and the Canons of the Fathers (twelve in all).
In Chapter Three, Spyros Troianos deals with the Greek canonical collection that came to be known as the Corpus canonum. While this document does not survive in its original form, a basic reconstruction can be achieved through indirect sources, beginning with the Syriac collection of 193 synodical canons. Like the formation of the Corpus, Troianos incorporates all of the known canonical documents thereafter, including imperial legislations, ecclesiastical law of civil origins, the canonical work of the ecumenical councils, synodal acts, and penitential literature through 1100. In Chapter Four, Troianos continues on a similar trajectory through the fifteenth century, with the addition of great canon lawyers, a discussion of jurisprudence in the ecclesiastical courts, and an examination of the laws governing monasteries and monks (known as monastic typika).
In the final chapter, Hubert Kaufhold discusses the sources of canon law in the Eastern Churches entire, beginning with the common tradition of canon law sources prior to Nicea. From these (primarily) Greek sources, he explores to what extent the Oriental translations rely directly on the Greek and how the collections of the various churches differ from one another in content despite their common origins. Specifically he considers the Melkites, the Jacobites (Western Syrians), the Maronites, the Copts, the Ethiopians, the Nestorians (Eastern Syrians), the Armenians, and the Georgians.
"Food is nothing less than sacrament." Those six words efficiently assess the entirety of The Spirit of Food. They even go some distance toward expressing the depth and diversity of the essays and their authors, including chefs and theologians, poets and priests, mothers, brides, farmers and playwrights. And the recipes—the recipes! Chokecherry and plum jams. Tangy glazed pork roast. Tuscan pizza, grilled zucchini, cilantro citrus hollandaise. To accommodate the fasting seasons, there's green chickpeas and spinach (cooked up by this reviewer and found delicious), quinoa with cucumbers and feta, and Olga's tasty fasting salad. Fusing storytelling with ethical reflection, personal tragedy, social awareness, family theatrics, and more than a smattering of theology (both subtle and overt), these writers broaden the ways in which we think about food, and maybe more importantly, hunger. As Simone Weil writes, "The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself it is not hungry." There's no feature writer here, though many names you will recognize—Lauren Winner, Wendell Berry, Robert Farrar Capon, Alexander Schmemman, Andre Dubus, Luci Shaw. In a very satisfying way, these essays blend one into another. Who wrote them matters much less than the ways of living they name, each bringing "our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn't need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together" (Andre Dubus).
Translated from the French and originally titled Que ma joie demeure (literally, That My Joy Remain), Joy of Man's Desiring is part myth and part fable---a book with that rare power to recalibrate the mind.Bobi---an itinerant acrobat who appears at the edge of the woods while a man plows his field in the middle of the night---is the novel's catalyst, oracle and poet. He befriends the farmer and his wife, convincing them to feed their grain to the birds, plant narcissi in their fields instead of wheat, and buy a stag (who speaks). At an impromptu communal meal (akin to Babette's Feast), Bobi persuades the entire community to trap three does from a neighboring forest for the stag's pleasure.
Giono's brand of magical realism is rooted in a spiritual sense of the material; rather than augmenting reality and making it too strange to believe, he realigns our understanding of reality all together. "Youth...is joy," Bobi tells the farmer (Jourdan). "And youth is neither strength nor nimbleness, nor even youth as you described it; it is the passion for the useless. The useless...as people say." When Jourdan dumps his fifty kilos of wheat on the ground for the birds, he enters a new actuality:
The grains had been colourless when he had heaped them in the middle of the dazzling threshing floor. Now, brilliant s rice, the wheat flew in the beating of the golden wings. He remembered that a moment ago he had seen the green finch take a grain in his bill, tilt his head, swallow it. He thought no farther along that line. In reality, it was not a thought but a secret leaven in his body. He was obliged to swallow often. He was drunk. He had just lost the poorly human sense of the useful. No longer could he lean to that side. He could not yet lean toward the useless, but he heard the swelling song of the flute that sings for the lepers.
The pastoral world these characters inhabit extends both internally and externally. Nature is a purifying force, but so are their relationships with each another:
"I have always been alone," [Bobi] said, "and it has always been I who have looked out for others...But you have just said some words and made a little gesture, the movement of your hands toward my hair, as if to dry it yourself. And that, no one has ever done. And here I am facing a new thing...Do you understand, Mademoiselle, that if I have asked for nothing, it is not because I have not needed it? Do you understand, too, that if I have always given, it is precisely because I was so in need myself?"
There is pain in Joy of Man's Desiring, both the pain of hopelessness and the pain of a wound given air and light in order to heal. Sadness exists alongside freedom. Man is autonomous but in tremendous need, bringing to mind the words of another great French writer:
There is a transcendent energy whose source is in heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and of our bodies. We should ask for this food...We cannot store it" (Simone Weil).
As the summer conference season approaches, we're packing books and tuning up the van. We'll set up shop in Kansas City, Holyoke, Wheaton, Baltimore and Santa Fe before the summer's through. Take a look at the list below to see if we'll be in your area, or better yet, sign up for a conference. Speakers and workshop leaders include (but are not limited to): Robert Clark, Martha Serpas, Patricia Hempl, Larry Woiwode, Julia Kasdorf, David McGlynn, Lauren Winner, Walter Bruggemann, Vigen Guroian, Mother Nektaria, Laura Berquist, Ken Myers (Mars Hill Audio) and Over the Rhine.Stop by and say hello, or better yet, buy a book. We'd love to meet you.
June 5-7: Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America Parish Life Conference---Kansas City, KS
June 10-15: Glen East, Mt. Holyoke College---Holyoke, MA
June 13-15: CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts) Conference, Wheaton College---Wheaton, IL
July 16-19: CIRCE Conference, Baltimore, MD
July 28-August 3: Glen West, St. John's College---Santa Fe, NM
Written a few years after Undset's conversion to Catholicism (even as she was being honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature), Stages on the Road is a fusion of church history, hagiography, social critique and masterful storytelling. Undset spent years researching "God's friends," as they are called in Old Norse texts, before finally submitting to the Truth she discovered "in the original Christianity."
"By degrees my knowledge of history convinced me that the only thoroughly sane people...seemed to be those queer men and women the Catholic Church calls Saints," she writes. "They seemed to know the true explanation of man's undying hunger for happiness---his tragically insufficient love of peace, justice, and goodwill to his fellow men, his everlasting fall from grace."
Undset's commentary on the cult of saints is as compelling as her telling of their specific lives: "People who live in the Protestant tradition have been greatly taken with the fancy that the worship of saints is really nothing but masked polytheism---the saints are the old local divinities of popular belief smeared over with a little Christianity, but they are the same ancient idols with just the necessary coat of paint...the most ignorant and simple Catholics have always known that they are the very opposite of gods, men---that is, creatures, not creators."
The saints Undset chose for Stages on the Road are relatively unknown, and several were not canonized until some time after the book was published. The passionate Ramón Lull of Palma was "an insatiable woman-hunter" who was converted by the beautiful and pious wife of a Genoese merchant who showed him the cancer destroying her body. Rather than giving her his ardent devotion, she extolled him to bestow his "love on the only One who is incorruptible." Undset calls St. Angela Merici one of the first champions of the woman's movement and reminds us that for all of its baggage, the Church of the Middle Ages "recognized a sphere in which men and women could meet as human beings of equal value...in the sight of God a masculine soul and a feminine soul were equally precious." The monastic life made it possible for cloistered women "to develop and make free use of their peculiar and unusual gifts" because God had formed them, and "the differences and variations were a part of the diversity with which the Creator adorned His creation."
She writes about St. Robert Southwell, St. Margaret Clitherow and St. John Ogilvie with similar verve, provoking one reviewer to call Stages on the Road "a thumping good read...truly relevant to our era." As in her masterpiece Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset never shrinks from presenting the truth as whole as she can. These saints, like her characters, do not withdraw from the complexity or temptations of their ardent natures, but neither do they (in Undset's words) "evade the troublesome duty of becoming saints." They find their way to God by following the steps of those who have gone before---and with them pray, "Suffer me not to part from Thee."
The Ressourcement Movement---generally defined as "a return to the sources"---has gained momentum in recent years, not only in Catholic circles, but also among Protestant scholars interested in helping revive the "embodiment of a personally and ecclesially engaged exegetical, theological, and metaphysical approach to articulating the Christian faith" (from the Series Preface). Volumes in the Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality series explore the life and work of a particular church father and work from three related convictions: the shared inheritance of the Nicene faith as an entry point to all ecumenical endeavor; renewed attention to the exegetical approaches of the church fathers as an important aspect of ressourcement; and the conviction that a ressourcement of spiritual interpretation can contribute toward the ecclesial, moral, economical, and social fragmentation of contemporary society. A tall, but worthy, order.As the inaugural book in the series, Athanasius is, most obviously, a presentation of Athanasius' confrontation with Arianism. Known for his fiery temperament, Athanasius frequently sparred with opponents and allies alike. To quote Peter Leihart, his spars with the Christian emperor Constantine "threw off sparks" and, for "all his reputation for piety and theological acumen," Athanasius was "a tough, skillful infigher, a community organizer and rabble-rouser, willing to use intimidation or other tools in pursuit of his aims." Leithart is well-acquainted with the Athanasian corpus and here examines Athanasius' views of Scripture and metaphysics. Described as a "precritical interpreter" of Scripture, Athanasius' work was critical to the formation of Nicene tradition, making his mode of biblical interpretation particularly important. Leithart discusses the metaphysical and hermeneutical dimensions of Athanasius' typology as well as his use of paradeigmata---the interpretation of specific biblical passages through the use of "privileged biblical images," rather than a philosophical framework. In the course of articulating the arc of Athanasius' theology, Leithart engages with modern and contemporary scholars such as Rahner, Barth, John Behr, David Bentley Hart, Jürgen Moltmann and Hegal. He perceptively outlines Athanasius' well-known, if sometimes misunderstood, doctrine of theopoiēsis: having been brought into the communion of Father, Son, and Spirit by the incarnation of the Son, "we begin to share divine attributes in a creaturely fashion." Transcendence is not an ascent beyond creatureliness, but rather the divine and perfected embodiment of the flesh. "We are able to share in these divine perfections because he took a body and because we have become his body."
If The Plot to Kill God was reconstructed as an upper level religion or sociology course (the tenor of the book as a whole makes this sort of speculation easy to imagine), its title would be something like "God and the Human Experience" or (tongue planted firmly in cheek), "How to Break Richard Dawkins' Heart." In essence, the book is a sociological assessment of belief: what determines the faith of individuals, and how do large-scale structural changes impact the ideologies and religious worldview of a population? Placed within the context of Soviet-era secularization, Froese (a professor of Sociology at Baylor University) explores the realities of ideological commitment and religious faith using English-language testimonials, histories, and translated documents---though the sources themselves present a particular difficulty. Because so much of the information that came out of the Soviet Union was systematically skewed (by both Soviet supporters and individuals who opposed the regime) in order to support certain ideological agendas, constructing an accurate picture of Soviet life is "highly problematic" (Froese in the Notes).Froese manages to cull the historical mess of Soviet Union history, linking social scientific theories of religion with what is known about Soviet-era life. He begins with the explication of six basic sociological assertions concerning religion that were directly tested by Soviet antireligious policy and then explores the characteristics of Soviet Communism that led some to call it a "civil religion." Through discussions of coercion and converson, Froese explores the ways in which the former was employed in the ongoing experiment to secularize society and the latter was put into use through the strategies of education, propaganda, and atheistic ritual. He then examines religious change since the fall of communism, especially the reemergence of religious monopolies as a way to "harness an emerging curiosity and interest in all things religious." Basing his premise on empirical evidence, Froese concludes that invoking God is easier (and more successful) than trying to kill him. In an interesting turn, he compares the religious and political cultures of the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the United States, and Communist China in terms of strategies "for how to tame religion for political ends."
Ultimately, the concept of a transcendent God was simply too indelible to erase. Froese points out that while the Soviet Secularization Experiment demonstrated the extent to which religious belief is ingrained, "it is unable to parse out the genetic, philosophical, or mystical sources of religious faith." The idea of God---even as manifested in the "manic disgust" of the Marxist-Leninists---"remains a persistent and significant aspect of the human experience."
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism challenges at every turn. Originally published in 1976, this edition includes the 1978 Foreword appended to its beginning and the 1996 Afterword to its end. It's dense and philosophical and influential. The persuasive and popular cultural critic Michael Pollan has often referred to Bell's work when writing or speaking about capitalism's propensity to erode moral categories, religion, and the impulse to act out of altruism rather than greed. Likewise, the highly-esteemed philosopher Charles Taylor (and those who categorize his work) list Bell as an important influence.Part of the burgeoning 1960s neo-conservative movement, Bell has famously described himself as "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." He directly links economic policy with a culture's moral and ethical systems, stating that "what ultimately provides direction for the economy is the value system of the culture in which the economy is embedded. Economic policy can be efficacious as a means; but it can only be as just as the cultural value system that shapes it." For Bell, socialism is not about statism or collective ownerwhip but "a judgment on the priorities of economic policy" in which community should supersede the values of the individual. In terms of culture, he respects tradition as well as "reasoned judgments of good and bad about the qualities of a work of art." Tradition is essential to the vitality of a culture because it provides continuity of memory---"If I forget thee, o Jerusalem, let my reight hand lose its cunning" (Psalm 137:5).
Primarily a book about tensions---the tension of asceticism and acquisitiveness, the tension between bourgeois society and modernism, the separation of law from morality---The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism gropes toward a new vocabulary of limits rather than the Modernist excesses of the beyond ("to explore the apeiron, the boundless, driven by the self-infinitizing spirit of the radical self"). By dispensing with our multiple manifest destinies, Bell calls for a better kind of social compact based on reaffirmation of our past, recognition of the limits of resources and the priority of needs over wants, and an agreed upon equity through which people "become more equal so that they can be treated equally." At the fulcrum of Bell's thesis, religion animates but does not dominate his premise: "I believe that a culture which has become aware of the limits in exploring the mundane will turn, at some point, to the effort to recover the sacred."
Rather than moving from ideas to things (which began with Decartes and became what we know as idealism), the esteemed French philsopher Étienne Gilson insists upon dispensing with idealism altogether. One cannot begin as an idealist and end up as anything except an idealist; in Gilson's words, "something outside thought cannot be thought of."Methodical Realism seeks to remedy the problems inherent in metaphysical realism, which Gilson also refers to as Thomistic realism. By first defining the positions habitually adopted by most realists---mediate realism and immediate realism---and then discussing the merits of each, he attempts to define and justify a third way (see the title of the book). Interacting with the texts of Léon Noël, Désiré-Joseph Mercier, Thomas Aquinas, René Decartes, Baruch de Spinoza, and Aristotle, Gilson exposes the flaws of idealism as a way to show why and in what sense is it possible to speak of methodical realism at all.
Because reality dictates the method, and not method the reality, the realist method "starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts." Again and again Gilson decries the need to critique knowledge since realism itself is "a form of knowledge that reaches a knowledge of the self only in and through being." What the idealist thinks, the realist knows. In very practical terms, the realist gains true liberty by deferring to the facts rather than being free with them:
For if it is true that things did not always happen exactly as their witnesses supposed, the relative errors they may have made are a trifling matter compared to those our imaginations will embroil us in if we start reconstructing facts, feelings, and ideas we never experienced, according to our own notions of what seems probable.
Bookended by Mary's comparably miraculous conception and Dormition, The Life of the Virgin moves, in the words of translator Stephen Showmaker, "well beyond the skeleton of events witnessed in earlier sources"---namely, the Protevangelium of James, the ancient narrative traditions of Mary's Dormition and Assumption, and the canonical gospels. Originally written in Greek, the book survives only in an Old Georgian translation from which it has been translated into English. Close cultural and political ties between Georgia and the Byzantine Empire resulted in many such translations, primarily due to Georgia's ecclesiastical unity with Constantinople. In particular, the monasteries of Mount Athos (where The Life of the Virgin was translated toward the end of the tenth century) functioned as an important site of cultural exchange.Showmaker's introduction to the text takes a lively and compelling look at not only the manuscript's history, but also the question of its authorship. Ignored by many Maximus scholars as inauthentic, The Life of the Virgin needs to be, according to Showmaker, more "carefully examined for possible concections witeh themes of Maximus' theology." The eminent philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar reacted with unbridled enthusiasm when given a copy of a French translation done by Michel van Esbroeck: "I put away everything else and rushed to read the inroductions and then the text. It clearly gives us a Maximus, who is entirely new but recognizable, as you have demonstrated, and who is involved in a great tradition---known and unknown---and is much more accessible than in most of his theological works."
Uncertainties about its authorship aside, The Life of the Virgin remains an essential text for the understanding of Marian piety during early Christianity and the transmission of these beliefs and practices to the medieval church. Organized in short chapters (similar to the Bible, minus verse designations), this "primitive Marian biography"---as the translator calls it---writes Mary into the life of her son at every opportunity. She plays a prominent role throughout his ministry, amidst and following his Passion, and in the formation of the early church. Identified as the leader of the women who followed Christ (who are occasionally named as being "Mary's"), she not only has authoritative knowledge of his teachings but also takes charge of the female disciples during the sacred rite of the Last Supper. Prior to the study and publication of The Life of the Virgin, this emphasis on Mary's maternal role was said to have originated during the ninth century in the Christian East and toward the end of the eleventh in the West. Known as "affective piety," this distinctive sytle of spirituality (as manifest in both Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) encourages the faithful "to share mentally in the torment and sorrow" of a suffering Christ rather than simply worship him as a regal and triumphant figure. Skillfully navigating the devotional and scholarly trajectories of the text, Showmaker's notes are concise but comprehensive. His Life of the Virgin is a rich resource for scholars as well as the devout faithful and those seeking a better understanding of Mary's intergral place in the life of the church.
As executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club for nearly ten years, William Zinsser helped develop a trusting audience by producing solid books and lectures on the writer's craft, to the extent that he felt "the moment was right" to approach the very personal subject of religious writing. "Writers who are nourished by spritual concerns," Zinsser writes, "are on a different kind of pilgrimage from other writers: a lifelong search for the source of their faith as individuals and of their strength as artists." His introduction to Going on Faith introduces nine esteemed and divergent writers: four novelists (Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Jewish), a Jewish Buddhist poet, a religious historian, a Jewish spiritual writer whose work draws primarily from the Holocaust, an "earth ecstatic" bent on "a form of beholding that is a kind of prayer," and a contemplative memoirist.*Sacred places, pilgrimage, and spiritual quest unite these authors. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us in his essay "Writing as a Means of Grace," the quest means "starting where we are with what we have and with what we have found to quest again." Allen Ginsberg's "Meditation and Poetics" speaks to the idea of purification in terms of letting go, of not revising thoughts or their sequence. Similarly, the idea of presence surfaces in every essay, according to each writer's ilk. As Frederick Buechner puts it, "I'm talking about how, by something like grace, you're given every once in a while to be better than you are and to write more than you know." Because these author's stories were delivered as lectures first, they capture that marvelous feeling of being spoken to personally, but also collectively. The book fittingly concludes with a series of informal, author-written bibliographies of favorite and/or influential books, perpetuating the quest.
*Authors (in corresponding order): David Bradley, Frederick Buechner, Mary Gordon, Hugh Nissenson, Allen Ginsberg, Jaroslav Pelikan, Hillel Levine, Diane Ackerman, and Patricia Hampl.
Born in Tuscany in 1577, Roberto de Nobili entered the Society of the Jesuits in 1597 and was sent to southern India in 1605 as a missionary. A short time later he began incorporating an innovative form of adaptation (accommodatio) of the Roman Catholic faith to Indian culture as a means to make his spiritual mission clear. He adopted the local Indian customs of shaving his head, wearing the traditional white dohti and wooden sandals, and embracing the practice of wearing a three-stringed thread across his chest. Resembling the sannyasin (Hindu ascetics), de Nobili learned Sanskrit as well as the important south Indian vernacular of Tamil and studied religious texts in both. He called himself "a teacher of wisdom" and began engaging Hindu scholars and the upper stratas of Hindu culture about the truths of Christianity. Within a few years, he found himself in heated debate with other missionaries as well as fellow Jesuits over his positive attitude toward Indian culture; during much of this time he was forbidden to accept converts made through the "culturally sensitive form of Christianity he had devised" (from the Introduction).The three treatises collected in Preaching Wisdom to the Wise include The Report on Certain Customs of the Indian Nation, the Dialogue on Eternal Life, and the Inquiry into the Meaning of "God." The Report is de Nobili's only Latin work included here; in it he writes of the crusial distinctions between religion and culture and "argues for the distinction between the essentials of Christian faith and the cultural trappings of European Christianity" (from the Introduction). Written as a conversation between a teacher and his disciple, The Dialogue is thought to be the earliest of his writings in Tamil and offers a well-reasoned explanation of the Christian faith as both intelligent and moral. A much briefer work, the Inquiry is an elegant and succinct theological polemic arguing that the deities represented within Indian tradition do not possess the key features that must belong to the true God. The fact that critics and advocates of de Nobili's methods continue to attack and praise him even today underscores his importance. As one of the translators---himself an Indian Jesuit---puts it, de Nobili remains relevant for his willingness "to learn from others and open [himself] to the influences from the outside...This sort of interculturality one does not expect from many even today, especially in the realm of religious belief, and we must admire de Nobili for what he accomplished so long ago" (from the Introduction).
A professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Smith College, Maria Nemcová Banerjee has devoted much of her career to the study and teaching of Dostoevsky and has come to see his "novelistic world as an intellectually coherent, spiritually integral whole." In The Scandal of Reason she explores, in particular, his struggle to maintain belief between the poles of faith and reason. As Banerjee lyrically describes it: "Like threads running crosswise on a taut loom, warp and weft, the conflict between faith and reason weaves the strong fabric of Dostoevsky's spiritual life."While in a Siberian prison camp, Dostoevsky wrote that he was only capable of experiencing faith per negationem---by drawing strength out of the power of contradiction. The deadlock of faith and reason within which he perpetually struggled could be undone only through a free commitment of his wayward will and affirmed through the "radiant image of Christ the Son of God and Man in an ontological act of love."
Playing off of the multilayered meaning of scandal (skandalon in Greek)---"a snare, a trap for the human will and a cause of moral stumbling"---Banerjee uses what she terms the diptych texts of Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov to examine the harm reason can do to the human soul when it is separated from love. Through the image of the underground man, she discusses man's isolation from real life, trapped in his own cage of freedom. Ivan Karamzov represents "the rebellious sons who pushed their fathers off the historical stage," not unlike Oedipus, to whom Banerjee compares him. Yet while Oedipus ultimately claims responsibility for what he did unknowingly, Ivan becomes tragically entangled in his own intellectual experiement. Banerjee's understanding of Dostoevsky's worldview is shaped by the Russian philosophers Soloviev, Ivanov, and Berdiaev, but the question she leaves us with is uniquely her own: "Is it the dream of reason rather than its sleep that engenders the insidious monsters of modern history?"
The subtitle of Third Ways cleverly manages to incorporate the books' major players while pointing out that Allan Carlson is, after all, writing about the puzzle of economics. A professor of history at Hillsdale College and one of the nation's foremost family scholars, Carlson sets his course by way of Hillaire Belloc's Servile State, and more broadly, the "distributism" developed by Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Known as the Cheterbelloc (a phrase coined by George Bernard Shaw), the pair sought to formulate a functional Third Way between the poles of capitalism and communism. A re-creation of the property state, Belloc and Chesterton's Third Way "sought broad property ownership, small-scale production, and agrarian reform." Carlson examines what he terms "the crucal contemporary import" of Belloc's Servile State, in which servile means slavery, through which "an unfree majority of non-owners" work for the gain of "a free minority of owners." Though the Chesterbelloc Distributist movement faded quickly after Chesterton's death, Carlson points out the movement was more developed and influential than its detractors have admitted.The trajectory of Third Ways continues sequentially to examine six more episodes "in this ill-fated search" for a better kind of economics. Carlson next looks at what he terms "the wages of kin" and writes clearly about the various movements that sought to build a secular family-wage regime. Likewise, the Russian Agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov fashioned a complex analysis of the "natural family economy" (Chayanov), and various peasant political parties (called the "Green Rising") came to power in post-WWI Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. Maybe most curious and misunderstood was the emergence of "socialist housewives" in Sweden "as a genuine political and economic force that attempted to keep both collectivism and individualism out of working-class homes." Karl Polanyi follows, with an exploration of his "economy without markets," the "great transformation," and "the always embedded market economy" (Polanyi's terminology). His final look back focuses on the emergence of Christian Democracy and its distinctive concentration on social justice and the well-being of families and other organic communities. Though these episodes appear to be a collective failure, Carlson draws from them to propose a new way---what he terms the Family Way---based on personal autonomy, family integrity, and a culture of enterprise. As Wendell Berry writes in Home Economics: "It may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe."
Don't set this book aside too soon---that is, if you set it aside at all. While it begins pretty typically as a chatty family memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming soon deepens into the story and life of a small-town Louisiana family. More than that, it rings true and lives up to the story of St. Thérèse of Lisieux after which it plainly takes its heart.Ruthie Leming---sister of the columnist and cultural critic, Rod Dreher---is an ebullient, unabashedly small-town girl with an unrestrained love for neighbors and strangers alike. While Dreher can't wait to get out of his hometown of St. Francisville, LA, Ruthie marries her high school sweetheart and becomes a middle school teacher, raising three girls along the way. She is a beloved member of the community, an empathetic and loyal friend, a defender of the poor, and the sort of teacher that changes lives.
At forty, Ruthie is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, and Dreher chronicles her astonishing response to her fatal diagnosis. Rather than reel from the grief and fear such news most often brings (which is not to say she isn't afraid), Ruthie refuses to be angry and instead embraces her suffering. She instructs her doctors only to tell her what she needs to do and puts her life in their hands, refusing to hear prognostications. Ruthie's denial raises troubling questions in Dreher's mind about accepting truth, but he moves past philosophy as he wrestles with the indifference of reality, keeping in mind Ruthie's active and self-sacrifical nature: "The truth---the whole truth, that is---would not set her free, but would make her captive to anxiety, and tempt her to despair."
But The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is less about Ruthie than it is about her community. The world doesn't rest on Ruthie's shoulders because her family, friends, students, colleagues, and even mere acquaintances carry it with her, supporting her and her family at every turn. As he searches to understand his sister's "inner peace and happiness in community," Dreher comes to understand that if he wants what Ruthie has, he needs to "practice a rule of stability"---to "accept the limitations of a place, in humility." Only then will "the joys that can be found there...open themselves."
"To get away from old things passing themselves off as tradition," writes the theologian Henri de Lubac, "it is necessary to go back to the farthest past---which will reveal itself to be the nearest present." Wolfe's collection of essays written over the past quarter of a century inhabit that sense of the "nearest present" as he reevaluates his own life's pilgrimage through the lens of John W. O'Malley's Four Cultures of the West. O'Malley's book, which serves as a sort of Virgil to Wolfe's Dante, "is a lively, wide-ranging, historical survey of the core styles of though and vision that have shaped our civilization," and Wolfe generally defines the four cultures as academic, prophetic, humanist, and the visual/performing arts.
Wolfe takes his title from a character in Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot (a line repeated in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Nobel Lecture") and traces his trajectory from a young man railing against modern culture to a career based in "culture making" and spent in the realms of creative writing and the arts. Especially drawn to the tensions that arise when two cultures meet ("What happens when prophecy meets art, heaven meets earth---when divine imperatives meet the tangled human condition?"), Wolfe has devoted much of his working life to the way that prophetic and imaginitatve cultures can exist in a creative friction of pull and give.
Organizationally, the book holds together, if loosely. Wolfe's essays start big in explorations of beauty's salvific grace, the uneasy relationship between Christians and contemporary culture, and his own vision of Christian humanism. He begins to whittle down to the details with a section of essays on writers of faith, particularly the Catholic writer and Christian poets. The full second half of the book moves engagingly from writer to writer to artist to thinker (forgive us for listing---we can't help ourselves): Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Shusaku Endo, Geoffrey Hill, Andrew Lytle, Wendell Berry, Larry Woiwode, Fred Folsom, Mary McCleary, Makoto Fujimura, Russell Kirk, Gerhart Niemeyer, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Marion Montgomery. These short bio/reflections are Wolfe's strongest pieces; he brings relatively unknown artists to our attention and offers fresh insights to the work of even the most celebrated writers. Be prepared for some repetition, but also revelation.
Collected as a result of Pelikan's 1987 Andrew W. Mellon Lectures, Imago Dei is, in Pelikan's words, "a study of the Byzantine theological arsenal" surrounding early Christian art. Pelikan deftly navigates and integrates both the political and doctrinal movements that drove the Byzantine conflict over icons as well as the "affray between the masculine and the feminine" (six Emperors fought against them; two Empresses "led them home in triumph").Central to the book's structure is a pre-Iconoclastic tapestry of the Mother of God with the Christ Child on her knee, acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1968 and, ostensibly, the spark that ignited Pelikan's curiosity about icons. He examines a particular aspect of the Icon of the Virgin in each chapter (orginally distinct lectures), making use of the tapestry as an iconographic "text" by which to explore the contradictions between Old Testament prohibitions against the making and worshipping of graven images and the Christian images made in the early Church until this day. Explaining the arguments for icons, Pelikan also documents early theologians' reluctance to permit such artistic representations---even though, as John of Damascus puts it, "not everyone is literate, nor does everyone have time for reading."
The book itself is well-constructed, more square than rectangle, and slightly oversized. Printed on thick, white stock, the text and the icons used throughout are clear and distinct. One wonders why Princeton University Press didn't do Imago Dei the justice of color prints instead of black-and-white, but even this lack does not detract from Jaroslav Pelikan's articulate rendering of the theology behind the icons and, more broadly, the "connections between the divine, heavenly, and invisible world and its all too visible and sensual counterpart here below" (Judith Herrin in the foreword).
But be encouraged! New reviews will be posted at much more regular intervals, starting today. We hope you tune back in and enjoy these previews of our upcoming Catalog 25. Please read on...
Anton Theophilus Boisen: His Life, Work, Impact, and Theological Legacyby Robert David Leas---232 pp. paper $29.95
Early in the twentieth century, at a time when discussion of mental illness was taboo and as a rift between science and religion was widening, the theologian Anton Boisen devoted passionate work to the empirical study of mental illness. A “wounded healer” before Henri Nouwen coined the phrase, Boisen’s compassion for the mentally ill arose from his own periodic bouts of catatonic schizophrenia, during which he was hospitalized several times. Rather than seeing the mental illness as the enemy, he considered it to be a deeply formative experience, which could either lead to further breakdown or become a breakthrough to spiritual healing. His own illness, he believed, had been a means of healing, and it became his mission to help others.Companionship, to Boisen, was the one way to protect patients during their most vulnerable seasons and lead them to spiritual wholeness through their suffering. He gradually came to the view that listening to those who suffer could be not only an aid to the suffering but a vital tool for the seminarian to learn theology. In a theological climate preoccupied with hermeneutics and driven by text criticism, he proposed engaging with the “living human document” in a pursuit to understand humans’ interior encounters with God. This first biography of Boisen focuses on how his life, full of personal pain and an unsuccessful struggle for intimacy, led him to pioneer the movement of Clinical Pastoral Education, which has revolutionized pastoral training and has provided close companionship for many who suffer.
It’s easy to imagine saints as being beautiful in soul but not in body. Images do exist that portray saints as stiff, sad, and sexless (not to be confused with the serenity and sobriety of traditional iconography). The Renaissance, however, saw a flourishing of religious art that chose the path of celebrating saints precisely through the portrayal of great physical beauty. While there are those who would suggest that the Renaissance painters merely took advantage of the pious subject matter as an opportunity to showcase their technical skill, Kiely believes something much more theologically significant was at work. He reminds us that almost all painters and their patrons were confessing Christians who had great affection for the saints they painted or commissioned. He suggests that the beautiful portrayal of saints was in fact a celebration of Christ’s Incarnation and the consequent goodness of human embodied life. Writing in an engaging and even lighthearted tone, he revisits the traditions surrounding various saints and explores how their portrayal of responds to and deepens meaning in these traditions. Early chapters are devoted to Mary, John the Baptist, and Mary Magdalene. One later chapter explores how the manliness of saints such as Mark, Sebastian, and Rocco is portrayed; another explores the significance of Catherine of Siena’s asceticism and decapitation. While this is not a book of prayer, the affection evident throughout has the capacity to encourage readers in their own devotion. [Note: the book proper is slightly oversized with many full-color reproductions printed on heavier stock.]If you're anywhere near Wichita or even Kansas this weekend, please join us for our 25th Anniversary Celebration and Sale. If you can't make it, shop online (Thursday-Sunday) and save 20% off all merchandise* (free shipping does not apply with this offer).To mark our twenty-five years, we've compiled an anniversary collection featuring thirty writers and poets that, to quote our press release, celebrates "the lasting affection inspired by Eighth Day Books, a Wichita cultural landmark and one of the country’s great independent bookstores." Complete with over sixty color photographs and an essay on the store's founding by Warren Farha, Timely...Timeless will be available in-store on Friday, October 25th, and online Tuesday, October 29th.
On-site events this weekend include:
Friday, October 25, at 7:00 p.m.
Hillsboro native Jessica Penner will be reading from her new novel, Shaken in the Water, followed by a book signing. Refreshements (of course!) will be offered.Set in Western Kansas, Shaken in the Water follows the life of a Mennonite woman born in 1903 with a birthmark known as Tieja Kjoaw, the Tiger’s Scar---which portends either greatness or tragedy. To quote one reviewer: The reality of the world Jessica Penner creates in Shaken in the Water is never quite what it appears to be: love can so swiftly shift-shape into hatred, rage into compassion, understanding into rejection and longing. But for the reader there is always the Voice calling, “Herein!”—“Come in!”
Saturday, October 26, at 7:00 p.m.
Headlined by Newberry Award Winner Clare Vanderpool, more than a dozen local authors will read from the anniversary collection, Timely...Timeless. Refreshments (of course!) will be offered. Contributors to the book include Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, University of Missouri professor Scott Cairns, and Wichita writers Stephanie Mann, Roy Beckemeyer, Bo Bonner, and Arlice Davenport. Come and experience what John Traffas, Atchison, means when he describes Eighth Day as the “happy combination of a pub and a chapel.”
Friday and Saturday, In-Store Purchases:20% off new merchandise
35% off all used books
35% off all used books
Thursday through Sunday (midnight) Internet Customers*:20% off everything
[If you call the store to place your order, we will give you 35% off all used books. Our website is unable to process multiple discounts.]
As you hopefully have read in either our e-mail newsletter or blog, we're celebrating our 25th Anniversary this weekend. There will be readings, refreshments, old friends, new friends, and plenty of books!
If you're unable to be there in person, you need not miss out on the sale. Now (Thursday) through Sunday (at midnight), we are offering 20% off all merchandise purchased through our site. No promo code is necessary; the discount will be applied at checkout. Free shipping is not included.
Better yet, if you call us to place your order, we will give you 35% off all used books. But you must call (1.800.841.2541), as our website is unable to process multiple discounts. Phone orders can be placed from 10 am to 8 pm Thursday and Friday, and from 10 am to midnight Saturday (CDT).
“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” Jane Smiley
“Sleep is good, he said, And books are better.” George R.R. MartinTimely…Timeless: Twenty-five Years at Eighth Day Books is now available online.
Conceived as a way to honor the store's place in the world, Timely...Timeless serves the equally important purpose of honoring Eighth Day's loyal and enthusiastic customers---friends we've been honored to know and serve. The book's essays, poems, and photographs celebrate this mutual affection.Named “one of the best religious bookstores in the country” by Publisher’s Weekly, Eighth Day was founded in 1988 by Warren Farha, whose essay on the store's founding joins the work of other notable contributors including: Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, University of Missouri professor Scott Cairns, Newbery award-winner Clare Vanderpool, and Wichita writers Stephanie Mann, Roy Beckemeyer, Bo Bonner, and Arlice Davenport.
Carolyn Ballinger of Kingman, KS, calls the store “a haven of peace in a world of sensory overload.” Notre Dame’s Joshua Seachris likens Eighth Day to “a sanctuary filled with cloth and paper treasures,” while John Traffas, Atchison, KS, describes the “happy combination of a pub and a chapel.”
For those of you who were unable to submit something for the book, we've decided to extend our anniversary celebration by posting entries on this blog in the coming months. Click HERE for submission details or call the store if you have any questions (1.800.841.2541). You can email your entry to books@eighthdaybooks.com.
The first printing of Timely...Timeless was small, and nearly half the available copies have already been sold. Order your copy now.
Our published collection (Timely...Timeless) is available online, but for those of you who missed the submission deadline, we would like to extend our invitation through the end of the year. Everyone who has crossed paths with Eighth Day—whether in Wichita, on the road, or in virtual fashion via the internet or telephone—is invited to contribute. Share reminiscences, humorous moments, epic sagas, paens, poetic waxings and/or love letters. Please try to keep submissions to roughly 500 words; we reserve the right to edit for publication. Photographs and original artwork depicting themes related to Eighth Day Books will also be considered for inclusion; please submit in jpg format (300 dpi preferred). A complete list of guidelines can be found HERE.We will publish submissions as we receive them, through the end of the year.
____________________________________________________________
A well of beauty, truth, and love
“Why do those guys hang out at Eighth Day Books all the time?”
Because I had never needed a reason to hang out at Eighth Day, I was drawn up short. “I think that they think it's beautiful,” I stammered.
Through literature, poetry, and art, Eighth Day Books is a well of beauty. It is served up in cold, gulping draughts through books, staff, book groups, and conversations. It spills over to Eighth Day Institute and all over this bookstore that is community. Eighth Day is a deep pool fed by the most ancient and refreshing springs.
As a denizen of the Eighth Day community, I see that my answer is true for many. We are compelled by our very souls to drink deeply of beauty; it is not an option. Beauty is like water, like air. I'm not sure if it is an indication of our hideous brokenness or our great health that we find it so necessary; I suspect it shows both those things. And it is not just beauty we are thirsty for, it is also truth and love.
Many friends of the store are also deep wells of beauty, truth, and love. They are at the same time wells and the sojourners to the wells. As we go on our way in hopes of participating in and becoming, it seems that there is a constant struggle, a swimming upstream.
We are a multicolored panoply of sojourners; dancing, singing (and sometimes trudging) out to the wells, to Beauty, Truth, and Love. Like bohemians of La Belle Epoque, children of the revolution. It comes from standing a bit outside the culture, I suppose, this struggle does. A discordance between chaos and rest, a hard-won choice to focus on what the ancients say is important rather than our culture, a financial pinch. (Or squeeze. Or vise grip.)
The people I know doing the most to pursue and provide beauty are beset by these struggles, constantly negotiating them. Why is that?
As I discussed my theory of the bohemians of La Belle Epoque with Warren one day, he said, “You just have to guess that the struggle is its own reward.” We agreed that the challenge is to wake up again the next day and guess the same thing.
Beauty for beauty's sake is the reward. Beauty, Truth, and Love are to be pursued for their own sake---for His own sake. Because He is the words in the books, He is the Living Water in all the wells.
We will get up tomorrow, and we will guess again. We will sing and dance, trudge, chase, and become again---until the arrival of La Belle Epoque, the eighth day which is eternity.
For His sake.
Nyleen Lacy, Wichita, KS
Many histories of early Christianity focus on doctrinal developments, councils, or the development of church structure. Most center their attention on the events that occurred in Rome or Asia Minor. Wilken purposefully spreads his attention to include political and cultural changes brought about by Christianity, widening his view to include the growth of Christianity as far as early missionary movement carried it. With the aim of offering a global history of early Christianity, Wilken draws our attention to the unique ancient Christian heritages of Ethiopia and Egypt, the early fledgling churches in India and east Asia, the semitic Christianity of the Syriac-speaking churches, Christianity’s arrival in Armenia and Georgia, and the baptism of the Russian prince in 988. He also devotes several chapters to chronicling the rise of Islam and the consequent dwindling of the Christian communities in Spain, Northern Africa, and the Near East without obscuring the central events in Rome and Constantinople that formed the doctrine and polity of the Church. To capture such a broad picture of early Christianity chapters are short and detailed citations have been avoided; the result is a thorough introduction to the rise of Christianity as a world-shaping faith. We think Wilken’s Spirit of Early Christian Thought is one of the finest introductions to that theme of its kind. With his beautiful synthesis of substantial scholarship and accessible style, we would venture the same about The First Thousand Years.
Reading through the chapter titles of this book is enough to make a person chuckle, maybe wince a few times, and certainly raise an eyebrow in wonder: “How does he answer that one?” Eminent historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, who has written several seminal works on the history of Christian thought (Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence), turns his expertise to answering popular misconceptions about Christianity. He addresses beliefs hostile to Christianity (“Christianity warps children,” “Christians need a crutch”) as well as beliefs Christians of different sorts assume about each other (“The Catholic Church discourages reading the Bible,” “Protestantism is puritanical”). Some misconceptions arise from a missing piece of information (“Christians persecuted Galileo for saying the earth revolves around the Sun”) or a missed step in reasoning (“Saying ‘I don’t know’ is the most defensible position”).Without preaching or making daring forays into speculation, Russell simply sorts the seed of truth from the myth that has grown from it. Since he does not claim (or seek) to prove ultimate questions such as the existence of God but rather to explain why belief in God cannot properly be called “anti-scientific,” his work is a helpful tool for intellectually honest readers of all persuasions. Exposing Myths About Christianity clears away the weeds so that constructive conversation about Christianity can flourish.
A bewildering array of answers to Life’s Big Questions correspond to an equally staggering set of possible life patterns. Individuals must navigate this smorgasbord, with theology and religious institutions occupying a marginal place in the decision process, far removed from the public square. Voices of various persuasions offer interpretations of the state of affairs: as a welcome culmination of individual freedom, a crisis resulting from Christians failing to evangelize, the legacy of postmodern philosophers and the single-handed work of a few twentieth-century policy-makers. While working separately on projects in Reformation history and in twentieth-century secularization, historian Brad Gregory discovered that the two periods are more closely related than most historians realize. He paints an ambitious, panoramic view of the historical march toward modern secularization, arguing that its origins lie in the Protestant Reformation itself. While the Catholic Church had been struggling to produce Christians whose moral life was consistent with their faith, the reformers misidentified the problem as a theological one and attempted to solve it by rooting theology in Scripture alone. Not only did they fail to cultivate moral integrity among believers, but they also opened the door for a plethora of theological and ethical disagreements that no one—except, ultimately, the civil authorities—could arbitrate. As a result, religion no longer had any claim to public authority. To catalog this shift, Gregory analyzes six major factors leading to secularization, examining developments in politics, economics, ethics, and the academy. The claim that the Protestant Reformation was destined to unravel will be unsettling to many. Rather than condemning personal reading of Scripture, Gregory asks readers to acknowledge that relinquishing a central religious authority led predictably to a secular society. Implicit in his work is the challenge to reintegrate theology into mainstream scholarship. His claim that moral, rather than theological, rehabilitation is what the Reformation lacked, suggests that this is what a Christian future requires.
A five-volume edition of the addresses of Elder Aimilianos, Abbot of Simonopetra Monastery on Mt. Athos, appeared in 2003 as Archimandrite Aimilianos, Spiritual Instructions and Discourses (now extremely difficult to find). The Church at Prayer is a much smaller sampling of his addresses made available to a wider readership. This volume features, in particular, his work on the spiritual life. It begins with addresses “On Prayer,” on “The Prayer of the Holy Mountain,” and on the Divine Liturgy. The following talks turn their attention to social concerns, such as marriage and life in monastic communities, but even these reflections on marriage and monasticism take spiritual health and healing to be the ultimate purpose of either way of life. The final two essays concern “Spiritual Study” and “Spiritual Life,” pointing out that to maintain an authentic spiritual life, no one can remain in isolation but must both rely upon God and participate in the sacramental life of the Church. Throughout, the spoken quality of Elder Aimilianos’ messages rings through the text, making his authentic monastic voice nearly audible to the reader.
The Eighth Day Institute will be hosting the 4th annual Eighth Day Symposium January 16-18, 2014, at St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral. This year's symposium---Constantine, Christendom, and Christian Renewal---will host speakers from four different traditions, with the intent of facilitating an ecumenical dialogue through which each tradition can "turn toward and encounter one another, to sincerely listen to each other’s position, and to strive for common ground with the Nicene Creed as a foundation" (from the Institute's press release).Prompted by the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) and Peter Leithart’s recent publication of Defending Constantine, the symposium will include two full days of lectures and breakout sessions, as well as a banquet to celebrate the feast of St. Anthony the Great and two open houses hosted by The Ladder (Eighth Day Institute's headquarters) and Eighth Day Books.
Symposium speakers include:
Peter Leithart, President of Trinity House and adjunct senior fellow at New St. Andrews, presenting two keynote lectures: “Constantine the Pious” and “Honor the Son.”
Vigen Guorian, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, presenting “The Cultural Crisis of Our Times: Restoring a Compelling Vision of the Permanent Things” and a breakout session on “Christianity and Culture: A Russian Orthodox View.”
Alan Kreider, Professor of Church History and Mission at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, presenting “Constantine and the Transformation of Patience” and a breakout session on “Catechesis and Culture: Third and Fourth Century Views.”
Benjamin Wiker, Faculty Associate at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life and Visiting Associate Professor of Theology at Franciscan University, presenting “What Constantine Did for Christendom---On Purpose, or Otherwise.”
Click HERE to learn more about sessions and the speakers who will be offering them.
REGISTRATION for the event can be completed online, by phone at 316.573.8413, or in person at Eighth Day Books. Early registration ends December 31 (20% discount) and the deadline for the St. Anthony Banquet is January 12.
St. Isaac the Syrian, a seventh century cenobitic monk who was bishop of Ninevah for only five months before returning to solitude, spent most of his life in obscurity. Few details are known about his life. The written work he left behind, however, rose to fame within a century after his death, spreading throughout the monasteries of the Byzantine empire. Written in Syriac, they were quickly translated into Greek, Arabic, Georgian, Latin, and---by the late middle ages---several European languages. The nineteenth century saw their appearance and rapid adoption in Russia, meriting repeated mention by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. Wherever they have appeared, they have been an influential spiritual guide for monastics and laypeople alike. In this volume, the monks of the Holy Transfiguration Monastery have prepared a much-needed, authoritative English translation, working from both Greek and Syriac editions and compiling two manuscript traditions. While the first edition of their translation, which showed the footprints of their thorough scholarship, was in an oversized deluxe format, this second edition is conventionally sized and designed for daily use in the home and in the cell. It is the translator’ hope---as it was St. Isaac’s---that these writings would inspire the devotion of generations to come.
While the “Scopes Monkey Trial” is frequently cited as a landmark in the history of creation/evolution debates, rarely does anyone take a closer look at the cultural history that led to it. Why was the South in general, and Tennessee in particular, so intent on preserving the voice of religion in public schools? Charles Israel, assistant professor of history at the University of the South, reveals how the need to recover culturally from the Civil War led Southern leaders to focus on a strong spiritual foundation for society as a whole. While evangelicalism tended to emphasize direct, personal relationships between individuals and God, it also created a drive to influence social structure. No institution was more crucial in cultural formation than the public schools, which had only recently become the dominant education providers. Israel points out that if education is understood as the propagation of a culture, it becomes more clear why the dominant voices in Tennessee insisted that religion should have a say in public schooling. In addition, the cautionary spectacles of Germany’s plunge into World War I and the ineffectiveness of adult temperance campaigns seemed to underline the endemic corruption of human nature and society and the need to be vigilant concerning the content of children’s education, a perceived crucible for cultural preservation in the South.Our anniversary celebration continues into the new year! The following micro-essay was written by Amanda Hamm. Our published collection (Timely…Timeless) is still available online for purchase. Read on!__________________________________________________
I am finally getting a chance to pay homage to one of my favorite places on earth. I will start by giving thanks for the existence of Eighth Day Books, which is especially appropriate since I am writing this the day before Thanksgiving.
I first visited Eighth Day Books in 1995 or ’96. I do not live in Wichita, but someone told me I needed to go. I love independent bookstores so I was all for it. I arrived on a very cold Friday night in January. I think I was the only one in the store, and I can remember taking it all in. There was a peacefulness there that stayed with me long after I left. I left with some good books, determined to go back.
Throughout the years I began to move from Protestantism to more liturgical churches and finally realized that what I needed could be found in the Orthodox Church. Eighth Day remained present in my mind, and I began to go to Wichita just to visit. It made a wonderful day trip.
It has now become a necessity to visit Eighth Day whenever I can. Many of the books on my shelf were bought at Eighth Day, and I continue to increase their number as God allows. I honestly don’t think I would have discovered many of these titles apart from Eighth Day Books. The atmosphere of the store as experienced through Warren and the wonderful people who work there is in itself a blessing. There is no other place on earth like it.
Amanda Hamm, Sapulpa, OK
Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious Perspectives of Human Benevolenceby Andrew Michael Flescher and Daniel L. Worthen; 290 pp. paper $34.95
Is it possible to care authentically about another person’s well-being? Or is benevolence only a round-about way of looking out for our own interests---the proverbial what goes around comes around? Flescher and Worthen define altruism as action done for another person’s benefit, in which the other person’s well-being is the authentic motivation for acting. They realize that the conclusions we reach concerning altruism will influence what we expect of each other in society. For instance, if we are to expect self-interest, then we will not censure the civil servants who deserted their posts in the face of danger during Hurricane Katrina, and we will dub those who chose to help as heroes. The authors investigate the existence and prevalence of altruism from the perspectives of several disciplines: evolutionary biology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. In contrast to psychological egoism, which says that all action is self-interested to guarantee survival, and ethical egoism, which says that all action should be self-interested, Flescher and Worthen argue that even evolutionary biology recognizes and can account for genuine benevolence. Not only does altruism exist, they say, but humans can cultivate greater altruism purposefully. Turning to resources from philosophy and religion, they conclude that “self-regard and other-regard are not diametrical opposites, but the completion of each other” in the same way that “nature” and “nurture” complement each other as sources of altruism. Not only is human benevolence an option, it can also be the choice we make.
No comments:
Post a Comment