New Release

Thinking Through Faith:

New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars

Aristotle Papanikolaou and Elizabeth Prodromou  Editors

Foreword by Albert J. Raboteau

St Vladimir's Seminary Press

ISBN 978-0-88141-328-1

Softcover,  376 pages

Price; US $ 18.00

Within these pages a  younger generation of Orthodox scholars is America takes up the perennial task of transmitting the meaning of Christianity to a particular time and culture. This collection of twelve essays is the result of six years of reflective conversation and collaboration regarding core beliefs of the Orthodox faith, tenets that the authors present from fresh perspectives that appeal to reason and spiritual sensibilities alike. The essays include The Kingdom of God, The Foundations of Noetic Prayer, The Discipline of Theology, Understanding Pastoral Care in the Early church, Orthodox Theologies of Women and Ordained Ministry, reading the Lives of the Saints, The Meaning and Place of Death in an Orthodox Ethical Framework, Confession, Desires and Emotions, Byzantine Liturgy as God's family at Prayer, and the Orthodox Church in the Twentieth-Century.

Posted by Nina Chapman on behalf of St Vladimir's Seminary Press

NEW BOOK: The Person of The Christ: The Earthly Context of the Savior

By Daniel Fanous
Regina Orthodox Press
paperback, 255 pages
ISBN# 978-1-928653-332
$22.95

Living in a world that differed radically from ours, Jesus is revealed by researching His context. To come into knowledge of this context, it is to first-century Judaism that we must turn. Through a most unique synthesis of Orthodox Christian theology, early Church Fathers, rabbinic writings, and contemporary Jewish and Christian biblical scholarship, this astonishingly unique book explores the atmosphere of first-century Palestine in which Christ lived.

The Person Of The Christ explores many issues including the inter-testamental period; the Pharisees and Sadducees; the Sanhedrin; the concept of YHWH and its significance for the Orthodox Christian; the Shekhinah–the Jewish understanding of the presence of God–and its rich potential for understanding the Incarnation.

This work also thoroughly examines the development of the Jewish Messiah concept throughout the Scriptures, as well as early Judaic writings, and the reaction of Jesus to the Messianic concepts of His day. To follow Christ is to desire to know Him. The Person Of The Christ will bring readers closer to Jesus, His time, place and life.

"As soon as I began to read this great book, I was unable to bring my reading to an end. The blessed son of the Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Daniel Fanous, has succeeded in guiding my inner senses into the times of the ancient people of God, through his engaging style of writing. This work has been presented logically, biblically, and historically, to reveal the context of the Christ...This present work reveals to us the richness of our faith, as well as its foundations among the early Jews." - Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (from the Foreword)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Fanous is a member of St. Mark's Orthodox Church in Sydney, Australia. He is extensively involved in the theological education and services for high school and university youth. Daniel has spent many years exploring the Jewish roots of Christianity and its significance theologically and spiritually.

Now available at www.reginaorthodoxpress.com. For more information, please see http://personofchrist.wordpress.com

NEW BOOK: St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans

By Archbishop Dmitri (Royster)
2008, St Vladimir's Seminary Press
ISBN 978-0-881413212
softcover, 416 pages
Price: US $20.00

Written with the average lay reader in mind, this pastoral commentary on the Epistle to the Romans offers readers a clear explanation of the Apostle Paul's influential and controversial letter. Quotations from church fathers and parallel expressions from Scripture create a methodology consistent with Orthodox tradition. By also using hymns and texts from the Orthodox liturgical services, the author supplies deeper and broader contexts for familiar biblical verses. Appropriate for personal and group biblical study and for spiritual guidance and edification, this volume also serves as a useful aid to pastors in teaching and preparation of homilies.

His Eminence Dmitri is Archbishop of Dallas and the South of the Orthodox Church in America.

Posted by Nina Chapman on behalf of St. Vladimir's Seminary Press

NEW BOOK: Surprised by Christ by Fr. A. James Bernstein

Conciliar Press Ministries is pleased to announce the release of a new spiritual memoir of a man's conversion from Judaism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Raised in Queens, New York by formerly Orthodox Jewish parents whose faith had been undermined by the Holocaust, Arnold Bernstein went on a quest for the God he instinctively felt was there. He was ready to accept God in whatever form He chose to reveal Himself—and that form turned out to be Christ.

But Bernstein soon perceived discrepancies in the various forms of Protestant belief that surrounded him, and so his quest continued—this time for the true Church. With his Jewish heritage as a foundation, he came to the conclusion that the faith of his forefathers was fully honored and brought to completion only in the Orthodox Christian Church.

Surprised by Christ combines an engrossing memoir of one man’s life in historic situations—from the Six-Day War to the Jesus Movement in Berkeley—with a deeply felt examination of the distinctives of Orthodox theology that make the Orthodox Church the true home not only for Christian Jews, but for all who seek to know God as fully as He may be known.

The Rev. A. JAMES BERNSTEIN was a teenage chess champion whose dramatic conversion experience at the age of 16 led him to Christianity. His spiritual journey has included a number of twists and turn: he was chapter president of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at Queens College, helped found the Jews for Jesus ministry in San Francisco, was a staff member of the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley, served as a pastor of an Evangelical Orthodox Church near Silicon Valley, and later became an Eastern Orthodox convert and then priest. He lives with his wife Bonnie outside of Seattle, Washington, where he serves as pastor of St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church. Father James is the author of the booklets Orthodoxy: Jewish and Christian (Conciliar Press, 1990); Which Came First: The Church or the New Testament (CP, 1994); and Communion: A Family Affair (CP, 1999). He was also a contributor to the Orthodox Study Bible: New Testament and Psalms (Thomas Nelson, 1993).

For more information or to order Surprised by Christ, go to www.conciliarpress.com.

BOOK REVIEW: The Lenten Triodion Supplement

Published by: St. Tikhon Seminary Press

Reviewed by: Macrina Lewis, anaphorapress.com


At long last the Lenten Triodion Supplement is available in hardback format. For Orthodox liturgists, chanters, and choir directors, and also for those wishing to pray through the hymnography of the church at home when services are not locally available, this volume is a “pearl of great price.” The unassuming black hardcover boasting a gold-embossed cross contains essential hymnography for the long Lenten season. This volume joins its predecessors, The Lenten Triodion and The Festal Menaion, to form a triumvirate of what liturgists call “movable hymnography” for celebrating major feasts and the Great Fast throughout the liturgical year.

All three volumes have been translated as a joint effort between Met. KALLISTOS Ware of England and Mother Mary of the Monastery of the Veil in Bussey-en-Othe, France. The layout design of the Triodion Supplement tastefully matches that of the other two volumes, making for a clear and familiar presentation. Although there are a few minor word choices and spellings which reflect a more proper English than what is common usage in America, these are clearly the most widely-used and most cohesive texts available in English for Festal and Lenten hymnography.

The primary hymnography for Lent (including the preceding weeks, the first week, the weekends, and Holy Week) is found in The Lenten Triodion proper. The Lenten Triodion Supplement contains all the “supplementary” texts needed for weekdays of the Lenten season, including prescribed readings and prokeimena as well as hymnography for the daily Matins, Hours, and Vespers/Presanctified services.

Up until now, this translation and the full volume of supplementary texts has only been available in a spiral bind volume produced by the Monastery of the
Veil, and in recent years has become increasingly difficult to procure. With a pre-PC typewriter, the sisters did a wonderful job of making this great work available for the faithful, but the present publication elevates it to the rightful status it deserves alongside the other two volumes. There have been no changes in translation from the original; only the few minor spelling corrections necessary were changed in the text.

The paper is slightly glossy and appears very durable and easy to handle. The text is crisp and clean, printed in a traditional serif font on bright white. The volume measures 7” x 9”, matching the size of the volumes previously printed by St. Tikhon’s (The Festal Menaion, 1990 and The Lenten Triodion, 1994). The price is surprisingly low for such a good quality volume.

This most useful and handsome book will be well-used and treasured in many a kliros and prayer corner. Joining its predecessors, it completes the definitive set of English-language source-books for the Festal and Lenten hymnographical cycle. A hearty thanks to St. Tikhon’s for making this available. The volume itself ends with apt words: “Glory be to God.” Amen!

BOOK REVIEW: Lives of the Georgian Saints

By Archpriest Zacharia Machitadze
Trans. David and Lauren Elizabeth Ninoshvili
St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2006

Reviewed by Stephen Ullstrom

I first heard of this book on a blog several months ago. I was immediately interested, partly because my home parish is named after St. Nina, Equal-to-the-Apostles and Enlightener of Georgia, and partly because the book was highly recommended. But as a student I was a bit daunted by the price (US$29). Then, when I saw the number of pages (506), I also began imagining this to be a dense trade paperback-type book like some other similar books I had seen. So I put this book on my mental ‘maybe one-day’ list, and never got around to ordering it.

I was quite surprised, then, when I recently saw that someone had donated this book to our church library. Still being curious, I took the book off the shelf and opened it up. What I saw were glossy pages with large, well spaced text, chapters that were framed by colorful motifs, and on almost every page a beautiful reproduction of an icon or a photograph. Without having read a word, I was already very impressed with the beauty of this book, and was regretting my hasty judgments.

In reading the various lives detailed in the book, what has struck me the most is the great diversity of holy men and women. And not only that, but of how interconnected their lives were to each other, and to the history of the Georgian nation and people. Of course, this is something that I have known before, but these points were really re-emphasized for me in a tangible way due to the sheer number of lives I was reading all at once, and by the fact that they were all somehow tied to the same nation. For example, the saints detailed in this book are from almost every century since the ascension of Christ. Some were foreigners who settled in Georgia, and others were Georgians who settled abroad, and they include laymen, monastics, members of the nobility and the intelligentsia, and the list goes on.

That said, this book is not a scholarly book. Sources are not cited, and information on some saints are a little patchy. In many cases, this is probably due to a lack of available information. I also found myself wanting to know more the links between the different saints. An introduction, there is a brief history of Georgia which is helpful to a point, but I would have liked more information. Then again, perhaps that is material for another book. The stated purpose of this book, according to the author, is to bring together into one book information on all of the Georgian saints, events, and icons that are commemorated by the Georgian Church. And as an introduction to the Georgian saints, this book does a superb job. The only major oversight I can find is the lack of a pronunciation guide to assist with pronouncing the Georgian names.

For anyone interested in Georgia, or in saints, or in learning about another corner of Christendom, or in how Christianity can impact a nation and a people, this is an excellent book to start with. Even though it is not hot off the press, having been published in 2006, the information and stories are timeless. And the aesthetics are such that it will preserve well, to be savored for a long time to come.

BOOK REVIEW: Life and Teaching of Saint Seraphim of Sarov

By N. Puretzki and the Monastery of Sarov
Translated by G. Kochibrolashvili and M. Tooneman
Gozalov Books, 2007

Reviewed by Stephen Ullstrom

I found this book difficult to review for a couple of reasons. One being that I hadn't read any of the other books about St. Seraphim of Sarov, and so I cannot offer any comparisons or contrasts. The second is that I am not an expert on ascetic literature or practices, which is what a lot of this book covers. On the contrary, after reading this book I had several questions of my own to ask my parish priest about. So keeping this in mind, here is my review.

The Life and Teaching of Saint Seraphim of Sarov is a translation of two different Russian texts that were originally printed and re-printed in 1903 and 1991, respectively. The book is slim, containing only 64 pages. Nineteen of these are a Life of St. Seraphim, with the remainder being his teachings. A short prayer to St. Seraphim is also included.

Overall the translation reads clearly and smoothly, with occasional grammar mistakes or stilted language. The main translation problem that I had was that scripture verses were translated directly from the Russian Bible, instead of being taken from an accepted English translation. This resulted in some verses being worded so differently from what I was used to that I failed to recognize them. The other main problem were a few words that I thought could have been translated better. For example, instead of using the word ‘anointed’, the word ‘oiled’ was used. A Russian speaking friend of mine told me that this is because the translators went for a literal translation, which in my opinion isn’t always the best choice.

In terms of content, I found the Life of St. Seraphim to be quite detailed for only being nineteen pages. Though I had certainly heard of St. Seraphim before I read this book, I now feel that I have a much more rounded understanding of his life and how he came to be so popular in the Church. The teachings of St. Seraphim are equally to the point. They are divided into thirty-one different topics, such as ‘On God,’ ‘On Hope,’ ‘On Illnesses.’ There are definitely some good teachings here that will be worth returning to again and again. But there are also parts that I didn’t understand, or I didn’t know what to take from it. A lot of this confusion is probably due to my inexperience with ascetical and monastic writings, and with Russian Orthodox spirituality. This is also my main caution about this book.

In their introduction, the translators state that they hope that this book will “stimulate interest in the Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition, which is, regretfully, so little known in the Western World.” This is a laudable goal, but I don’t think that this book does the job. The reason being that beyond the Life of St. Seraphim, no context is given for what is being taught. For someone already familiar with the ascetical teachings and writings of Orthodoxy, this is not a problem, but for someone who is hearing this for the first time, I think that this could be both intriguing and confusing.

So I would recommend this as a quick introduction to St. Seraphim and some of the teachings of Orthodoxy. It is a short read, and yet contains a lot of meat. But I would also recommend, especially if you are new to Orthodoxy or ascetical and monastic literature, to have a priest or other mature Orthodox Christian nearby whom you can ask questions of. Because believe me, you will have questions.

Currently, this book is only available in the UK, and is distributed by Gazelle Book Services. It can be ordered here, and at a few other UK book sellers.