The Orthodox priest-scholar and my friend Father William Mills passed on to me an e-mail from the Jesuit, Father John Baldovin, who was in to see Father Robert Taft last weekend and reported that he is no longer eating and is very weak and frail. Taft, now in his 86^th year, will soon appear, it seems, before the “awesome tribunal of Christ,” as the Byzantine liturgy, which Taft has done so much to help us understand, plaintively puts it.

For those who do not know him, Taft has, more than any scholar of our time, helped Eastern Christians and others understand the Byzantine tradition, tracing out its liturgical history in all its fascinating and often messy details through hundreds of articles and books stretching back more than fifty years.

Though a Catholic, and a Jesuit whose whole life has been lived in the Russian recension of the Byzantine tradition, Taft has shaped many minds in the Orthodox world. Scholars such as Father Alexander Rentel at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York studied under him; Sister Vassa Larin was one of his last graduate students; and many other Orthodox and Catholic scholars today have been influenced by his myriad works. It is, in fact, impossible to study liturgy or Eastern Christian history seriously without coming across Taft’s works.

His formidable reputation precedes him, and so, when I was scheduled to be on a panel with him at the Orientale Lumen conference in Washington, DC in June 2011, I was a little nervous, for Taft is a gruff, no-nonsense kind of guy infamous for his take-no-prisoners style. He was still quite vigorous then, but clearly slowing down. We had, I was relieved to discover, a very amicable time together, in part because I had done my homework and was not indulging in some of the things Taft has long denounced, not least “confessional propaganda” masquerading, he says, as church history. Read More

As a prison chaplain in a pluralistic environment, I have often engaged in conversations with men and women of other faiths. This has challenged me to understand how Orthodox Christians can fruitfully engage in interfaith dialogue.*

To illustrate my own process of understanding, I would like to sketch an hypothetical interaction with an inmate called Damien, a Muslim who by all accounts practices his religion consistently, thoughtfully, and sincerely.

One day, Damien asks me a question: How can he find out whether his religion is true? He comes to me and not, say, to his own Muslim Chaplain, because I will respect his freedom to search without coercing him (however gently) to my own answer. At the same time, my own faith commitment compels me to respond to Damien in a way that maintains the integrity of Orthodox Christianity, including its claims to exclusive fulness of truth. How do I prepare? I go to that quintessential scriptural interfaith engagement: the Apostle Paul’s speech to the philosophers of Athens (Acts 17:22-31).

In this speech, St. Paul identifies an “unknown god” (v. 23) as the basis of dialogue with his pagan Greek audience. This unknown god is singular, utterly transcendent, and independent not only of human control (vv. 24-25), but also of the human ability to imaginatively conceive and thus represent (v. 29). The Apostle highlights here a way of thinking about God that is developed more fully in later Christian theology: apophaticism, a systematic negation of positive human conceptions of God’s nature. Read More

Sergey Sergeevich Horujy

In surveying the contemporary world as it appears to us in the daily media, in academic papers, and in our own personal observations, we find much cause for concern about conditions and unsustainable trends on Planet Earth, whether we are considering the health (in all senses of the word) of human populations or the sources of nutritious food, clean water, and affordable housing—or even the quality and character of our thoughts. Freedom together with “good government” (however these are defined) are often short-lived and in limited supply around the globe. The level of discourse in the public square often seems vulgar. The character of public education at all levels often seems unrelated to the actual needs of many people, and the cost, beyond their ability to pay. Nor is it designed to form young people in warm-hearted humanity, which used to be fruit and flower of a kind of Christian humanism in Western civilization. There are, of course, reasons for public education being structured as it is. Education (or training) delivery systems seem designed to serve the interests of corporate entities around the globe, without regard to the telos of human being. 

None of these observations or concerns is new. They all, however, derive from who we understand ourselves to be and, consequently, from what we have done to ourselves and to our planet. What, then, is the human being?  How shall we understand humankind in the largest possible sense?

Sergey S. Horujy [Хоружий] is a contemporary Russian philosopher whose “Synergic Anthropology” offers both a critique of philosophical anthropology in Western philosophical tradition and also a positive account of the human being based on his knowledge of modern Russian religious philosophy, as well as—and especially—on hesychastic thought and practice. One of Horujy’s most stimulating conversation partners in recent years has been the Confucian scholar, Tu Weiming, of Harvard and Peking University.  Read More

Sergei Semionovich Troitsky

August 8, 1881 ~ November 2, 1910

Memory Eternal ~ Вѣчная Память

Friend and Intended Life-Companion (Спутник Жизни) of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky

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