Published twenty-five years ago, this book is still the finest critique of the Enlightenment's ways of knowing, coupled with a winsome description of a distinctly Christian alternative. Responding to what he sees as a "division and fragmentation" both in theology and the larger culture due to "the one-sided way we have come to seek and recognize truth?manifest in the way in which all concern with truth has been relinquished to the sciences," Louth sets out to describe the source of that fragmentation and to challenge the notion that we must "accept the lot bequeathed to us by the Enlightenmen... View More...
The rich tapestry of the creation narrative in the early chapters of Genesis proved irresistible to the thoughtful, reflective minds of the church fathers. Within them they found the beginning threads from which to weave a theology of creation, Fall, and redemption. Following their mentor the apostle Paul, they explored the profound significance of Adam as a type of Christ, the second Adam. The six days of creation proved especially attractive among the fathers as a subject for commentary, with Basil the Great and Ambrose producing well-known Hexaemerons. Similarly, Augustine devoted portions... View More...
The colorful characters, poets and thinkers who populate this book range from Romania, Serbia, Greece, England, France and also include exiles from Communist Russia. Louth offers historical and biographical sketches that help us understand the thought and impact of these men and women. Only some of them belong to the ranks of professional theologians. Many were neither priests nor bishops, but influential laymen. The book concludes with an illuminating chapter on Metropolitan Kallistos and the theological vision of the Philokalia View More...
The colorful characters, poets and thinkers who populate this book range from Romania, Serbia, Greece, England, France and also include exiles from Communist Russia. Louth offers historical and biographical sketches that help us understand the thought and impact of these men and women. Only some of them belong to the ranks of professional theologians. Many were neither priests nor bishops, but influential laymen. The book concludes with an illuminating chapter on Metropolitan Kallistos and the theological vision of the Philokalia View More...
When a theologian sings, a special order of attention is due: his teaching has been transmuted into praise. St. John of Damascus (+ ca. 750), whose writings are often (if erroneously) marked as the close of the Patristic Age, gave us not only some of the greatest dogmatic treatises of all time but also some of the most magnificent hymnography: the Paschal canon, the funeral canon, the canons on the Transfiguration and the Dormition of the Mother of God. Strangely, scholarly attention to him in the English-speaking world has been almost non-existent, a lack that this important study grandly rem... View More...
When a theologian sings, a special order of attention is due: his teaching has been transmuted into praise. St. John of Damascus (+ ca. 750), whose writings are often (if erroneously) marked as the close of the Patristic Age, gave us not only some of the greatest dogmatic treatises of all time but also some of the most magnificent hymnography: the Paschal canon, the funeral canon, the canons on the Transfiguration and the Dormition of the Mother of God. Strangely, scholarly attention to him in the English-speaking world has been almost non-existent, a lack that this important study grandly rem... View More...
'The charge that the mystical strain in Christianity is alien to Christianity is a charge frequently made,' writes Andrew Louth. Some scholars contend that the Platonic spirituality found in the Church Fathers fundamentally opposes the contemplative and the active. Louth is interested not only in the extent to which Platonism determines the mystical theology of the Fathers but the extent to which this influence is resisted and rejected. Drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at Oxford and to a convent of Catholic sisters in the late 70s, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition is... View More...
The writings in this volume cast a glimmer of light upon the emerging traditions and organization of the infant church, during an otherwise little-known period of its development. A selection of letters and small-scale theological treatises from a group known as the Apostolic Fathers, several of whom were probably disciples of the Apostles, they provide a first-hand account of the early Church and outline a form of early Christianity still drawing on the theology and traditions of its parent religion, Judaism. Included here are the first Epistle of Bishop Clement of Rome, an impassioned plea f... View More...
The writings in this volume cast a glimmer of light upon the emerging traditions and organization of the infant church, during an otherwise little-known period of its development. A selection of letters and small-scale theological treatises from a group known as the Apostolic Fathers, several of whom were probably disciples of the Apostles, they provide a first-hand account of the early Church and outline a form of early Christianity still drawing on the theology and traditions of its parent religion, Judaism. Included here are the first Epistle of Bishop Clement of Rome, an impassioned plea f... View More...
This collection of essays in honor of His Grace, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, represent not only the scholar but also the man. Beginning with Andrew Louth's lively and informative biographical sketch (in which we discover young Timothy's mother dubbed him a ''Bath bun,'' in the spirit of his birthplace, and his Oxford comrades call him ''Super K''), the volume is organized into three categories, each examining different aspects of Orthodoxy's historical, theological and spiritual tradition in the West. Offered by a shining host of scholars and theologians in their own right, these papers reve... View More...
