NOW AVAILABLE: New Issue of The Handmaiden Journal

Conciliar Press has released a new issue of its quarterly women's journal, The Handmaiden.

The summer 2008 issue of The Handmaiden explores the mystery of today’s miracles, some that we encounter close to home, and others that we purposefully travel to as pilgrims, looking for deeper personal insight and inspiration. The issue includes the features "Finding a Miracle" by Paul D. Sidebottom; "My Encounter with Saint Xenia" by Jill Wallerstedt; "Our Lady of Cicero: Two Young Priests Share their Experience with a Weeping Icon" by Heather Zydek; and "A Pilgrimage of a Lifetime" by Archpriest John Bethancourt. The issue also features a host of regular columns, including A Word from the Editor, The Orthodox Home, Culture Currents, Close to Home, Verses of Praise, The Orthodox Kitchen, Women Making a Difference, Books to Treasure and a specially-themed Woman-to-Woman column for which we asked our readers to share their experiences of pilgrimages.

For more than a decade, The Handmaiden, published as a 64-page journal, has been serving Orthodox women by offering them fresh content to inspire and illumine their hearts. With the Handmaiden of the Lord, the Holy Theotokos, as its guide, The Handmaiden strives to be a beacon of light, a place where Orthodox Christian women and others who are interested in Orthodox life and spirituality can come together to learn, share, relate, and grow. Join us as part of The Handmaiden community, as we prayerfully and joyfully struggle to become the women of God we long to be.

Subscribe to The Handmaiden today at www.conciliarpress.com.

NEW BOOK: Feasts of Faith by Fr. William C. Mills

Feasts of Faith: Reflections on the Major Feast Days
By Fr. William C. Mills
Paperback (August 2008)
ISBN-13: 978-1-933275-23-9
Price: $13.95 + S&H (USD)

Feasts of Faith: Reflections on the Major Feast Days is a collection of pastoral reflections on the major feast days that appear in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar. The primary aim of Feasts of Faith is to encourage Orthodox Christians to learn more about the feast days through reading and reflecting on the rich scriptural texts that are associated with these special celebrations. The feast days include beautiful liturgical hymnography, but also prescribed Scripture readings for Matins, Vespers, and the Divine Liturgy which function as a context for understanding the importance of these festal celebrations. Feasts of Faith is not an exhaustive commentary on all the Scripture readings for the festal celebrations, but rather offers the reader an overview of the content and background of these readings. One hopes that by reading and studying the Word of God, the entire Church will be edified, encouraged, and challenged to follow the biblical God, the Father of Jesus Christ. Feasts of Faith is a valuable resource for personal and group Bible study, adult education classes, and sermon preparation.

Learn more about Feasts of Faith at www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org.

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!