One of the towering figures in the Orthodox Church in the 20th century was the Russian-American priest, Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, former Dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, an eminent theologian,liturgiologist, teacher, and author. His beloved wife, Matushka Juliana Schmemann, offers us a beautiful account of her life's journey with Father Alexander, from Talinn in Estonia and Baden-Baden in Germany, to Paris, New York, and Lac Labelle in Quebec. She is also the translator and editor of Fr. Alexander's personal journal.
Join a young boy and his father on a daring journey from Mexico to Texas to find a new life. They’ll need all the resilience and courage they can muster to safely cross the border − la frontera − and to make a home for themselves in a new land.
This autobiographical work of Dr. Carl Mattina explores the author's struggles with severe anxiety, panic, and agoraphobia. Dr. Mattina reveals how mental and physical abuse at home and psychological torture from members of the medical establishment aided in causing his self-esteem to plummet, leaving him in the depths of depression at a very young age. As a young adult, his conflicts with sex and religion forced him to come to terms with his own sexuality and religious belief system. He continued to battle with severe stress, ongoing anxiety, and panic attacks while fighting to make sense of his torn, fragmented emotional state. The battle was not altogether lost, however. One may witness his transformation to a positive lifestyle full of hope and personal accomplishments brought about by a program called CHAANGE. Dr. Mattina discusses the necessary tools to overcome the symptoms of severe anxiety, panic, and agoraphobia, as well as rebuild self-esteem. After more than forty years, Dr. Mattina has turned fear into love and discovered his life's purpose. Be prepared to experience the author's magnificent journey from panic to peace.
According to Father Alexander Men (1935-1990), the Russian Orthodox priest and popular spiritual teacher who was publicly martyred in 1990 in the former USSR, prayer is “the flight of the heart toward God.” This work, available for the first time in English, is a collection of his writings, lectures, and sermons on prayer. You will discover both ancient and modern wisdom, and you will see how one Eastern Orthodox priest taught his parishioners to pray.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann continues to influence liturgical and sacramental theologies some thirty-five years after his death. Despite the wide acceptance within Protestant circles of his timeless classic, For the Life of the World, there has been relatively little written about him from an ecumenical context. This volume of collected essays seeks to explore his theological legacy and further his work. With essays from leading scholars such as David Fagerberg, Bruce Morrill, Joyce Zimmerman, and more, this volume is meant for both teachers and students of liturgical and sacramental theology. In an effort to introduce Schmemann to a wider audience and to celebrate his work through meaningful engagement and dialogue, contributors come from a wide variety of ecclesiastical backgrounds: Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Free Church, and more. “The Eucharist is therefore the manifestation of the Church as the new aeon; it is participation in the Kingdom as the parousia, as the presence of the Resurrected and Resurrecting Lord. It is not the ‘repetition’ of His advent or coming into the world, but the lifting up of the Church into His parousia, the Church’s participation in His heavenly glory.” Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, p. 72.
The book describes grwoing up in NYC, being the first member of his family to graduate from college and graduate scool and descibes the development of important new medical products and the formation of multiple early stage healthcare companies and the process of taking companies public and selling companies.
Our contemporary culture is dominated by two extremes relativism and fundamentalism. Neither is desirable: relativism claims that all questions of truth are irrelevant, whereas fundamentalism insists on sole possession of absolute truth. Internationally renowned sociologist of religion Peter Berger has gathered a group of scholars to consider how, from out of different traditions, one can define a middle position between both extremes. / After an extensive introductory overview by Berger, three essays ( sociological descriptions ) give an objective picture of how relativism and fundamentalism play out in today s world. In the second part ( theological directions ) authors from several different Christian traditions and one conservative Jewish tradition flesh out a normative middle ground that is neither relativist they affirm specific truth claims nor fundamentalist their affirmations include tolerance of the claims of others.
Both Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger insist that the human person remains shrouded in mystery without God's self-disclosure in the person of Jesus Christ. Like us, Jesus lived in a particular time and location, and therefore time and temporality must be part of the ontological question of what it means to be a human person. Yet, Jesus, the one who has time for us, ascended to the Father, and the bride of Christ awaits his return, and therefore time and temporality are conditioned by the eschatological. With this in mind, the ontological question of personhood and temporality is a question that concerns eschatology: how does eschatology shape personhood? Bringing together Schmemann and Ratzinger in a theological dialogue for the first time, this book explores their respective approaches and answers to the aforementioned question. While the two theologians share much in common, it is only Ratzinger's relational ontological approach that, by being consistently relational from top to bottom, consistently preserves the meaningfulness of temporal existence.
