It’s going to take a while before I do anything really serious with any of these, apart from dipping into them and scanning through them, but here are some books that have arrived in the post recently.
Father Boris Bobrinskoy’s The Mystery of the Church: A Course in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology has recently appeared in English and, although I actually have the French original and have dipped into it, I know that I will be more likely to read it properly in English. And there are others who I hope will also want to read it. And, to be perfectly honest, anything by Father Boris is simply a “must have.” (For those who don’t know his work, I summarised his The Compassion of the Father
, which he himself described as his best book, here).
While ordering that I also ordered the Popular Patristics Series edition of Saint Basil’s On the Holy Spirit which I have been wanting to get for a few years. (Well, there are lots of the PPS that I would like to get, and I keep wishing that a kind donor will buy the lot for Life-Giving Spring, but that is another story). It really does make a difference reading the Fathers in good contemporary translations rather than nineteenth century English! And while looking on the St Vladimir’s site I also decided to order Debora Belonick’s Feminism in Christianity: An Orthodox Christian Response
. This is not the top of my priorities at present, but the whole feminist theological project is something that I was once quite deeply involved in, and it has become something of a new orthodoxy, at least around here. I don’t know if I will ever write anything about my own disillusionment with such theological circles, which had quite a bit to do with my conversion to Orthodoxy, but I was nevertheless interested to see this short book that appeared in the early eighties and having skimmed through it am pretty sympathetic with most of what she says. (On a related note, I see that St Vlad’s are advertising a soon to be released book, Feminism and Tradition, by Father Lawrence Farley, but that will have to wait as I have other priorities).
A book that I have only dipped into but am quite exited about is Sr Nonna Verna Harrison’s God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation. Sr Nonna is a patristics scholar and a few years ago I read some serious academic articles of hers on the Cappadocian Fathers. But this book is in a different category and is written in a really accessible way for non-specialists. It is the sort of work that I think could be profitably used for a study group of non-specialists if we ever get something like that going. (I would also like to do something like that with Fr Boris’ book on the Church, but that is, admittedly, a bit more heavy going).
Together with this book I also ordered Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings , as I have been wanting to read more of and about St Nil for a while now. I have only dipped into it so far, but the more I learn of him, the more sympathy I have for him and he has become one of the patrons of Life-Giving Spring. (The list admittedly keeps growing).
Something that I was really delighted to receive recently was the the Readers’ Service Book of the Hours of the Orthodox Church published by Holy Myrrhbearers’ Monastery. I had ordered this in January and when it didn’t arrive after a few months had feared that it had got lost in the post and had pretty much resigned myself to having to wait until I could afford to order another copy and hope that it would get here. And then it arrived out of the blue. It has some interesting features which resonate quite well with me but which I’ll discuss again. I won’t be able to pray it in any regular and sustained way until I’m in Robertson permanently, but I am very pleased to have it.
Finally, the most recent arrival was the wonderful gift of of four volumes of the The Synaxarion. The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra and published by Ormylia, which a very kind donor had offered to buy us and had gone to quite a bit of trouble trying to find (the other volumes are still coming from a different distributor). They also took a while to arrive and so I was very pleased to get them on Saturday.
Oh, and as a final addendum, I have also been very pleased to find some books at a local charity shop, notably Archimandrite Lazarus Moore’s translation of The Ladder of Divine Ascent. But my most precious find of all, W.K.L. Clarke’s The Ascetic Works of Saint Basil, both for a rather small fraction of what one would pay online.
That’s enough for now. One of the things that we want to do at Life-Giving Spring is to build up a good library, and once things are more settled we need to look at how we can raise funds for this. But, apart from a couple of more basic catechetical things that are in the post, I’m having a moratorium on book buying for a while until my bank balance recovers and I have also managed to buy some bookbinding equipment!
June 26, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Congratulations on some wonderful acquisitions! I’m particularly envious of your Ascetic Works of St Basil…
June 26, 2012 at 9:50 pm
Yes, that is my pride and joy. I remember looking it up on Amazon a couple of years ago and seeing that it was selling for a couple of hundred US dollars, and promptly putting it out of my mind. And I got it for the equivalent of about nine dollars. The lady who runs the shop knew that I was interested in patristic stuff, but I think she had difficulty comprehending quite how overjoyed I was!
The thought has gone through my mind of investigating the copyright situation. I googled a bit on that and if I understood it correctly it was published just after the copyright law came into effect. But I’ve wondered whether it would be worth trying to get permission to put it in the public domain, in which case one could always scan it and make it available online. But I don’t know much about these things…
June 27, 2012 at 3:36 am
I really don’t understand why St Basil’s Ascetic Works haven’t been published in an affordable, modern edition. Classics of Western Spirituality ought to have done an edition of St Basil long before St Nil Sorsky, for instance, as great as the latter is!
June 27, 2012 at 9:27 am
Aaron, agreed. But then as we both noted Father Augustine Holmes arguing a few years ago here, Saint Basil has been a sadly neglected figure, especially in all the recent western interest in “spirituality”.
I don’t know if you know, but Anna Silvas’ The Asceticon of Saint Basil the Great was published a few years ago, I think by OUP but it is hugely expensive – a couple of hundred pounds if I remember correctly. If I could ever afford or justify the expense I would love to have it, but… and I agree these things need to be affordable and accessible, which is why I’d quite like to put this one online if that were possible (some of Clarke’s other books are, but they were published a bit earlier).
You don’t have the sort of contacts with Eighth Day Press that could suggest that they try and do something on this do you? The way they make Fr Andrew’s Discerning the Mystery available at an affordable price was wonderful, and if they could do something similar with the Silvas book it would be wonderful, although I suppose it may be too recent for that…
June 30, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Actually, I do know Warren Farha, the owner of Eighth Day, pretty well, and he seems to like me. Maybe I could put some pressure on. Whenever I ask about a book he doesn’t have, he seems a little embarrassed and very seriously writes down the title, promising that he will get it in.
June 30, 2012 at 10:46 pm
Aaron, that sounds like a very good idea!
June 26, 2012 at 9:39 pm
I’d be interested in knowing more about the book of the Hours. since we have just has the Hours for ordinary Sundays, and I wonder how the daily Hours differ.
June 26, 2012 at 9:57 pm
I don’t have it with me at the moment, so will have to check when I’m in Robertson. I seem to think that there’s not much difference in the Hours (or what in the West we called the Little Hours; it’s interesting to note that the title “Book of Hours” actually includes all the services of the daily cycle) except for the Kontakion etc, but I am really very ignorant of these things and haven’t looked at it very closely yet.