Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

Brief check-in —

Many thanks to all of you who visited because of Eirenikon‘s links to my Fellowship of Ss. Alban and Sergius write-ups; I hope you stay for awhile.

My French reading class started last Friday. I’m finding that the Latin and the Greek I’ve had in the four years since the last time I set foot in a French classroom is helping immensely; I’ve likely forgotten far more than I realize, but so far so good regardless. (I doubt very sincerely that Syriac is helping my French in the least.) We have two translation projects in the class; one which will be a text the instructor provides, and the other which will be a text of our own choosing — the idea is that we read a piece of scholarship (or a piece of a piece — three pages maximum) in our own fields. As it works out, there’s an article Fr. John Meyendorff wrote called “Byzance: l’image du Christ d’après Théodore Studite,” and it’s exactly three pages long. Sounds like a winner to me.

Reading-wise — well, there’s a pile of books on my wife’s side of the bed (and yes, I mean on her side of the bed; it keeps me from getting used to taking up the whole mattress in her absence), and it contains some of the following:

• The Spiritual World of St. Isaac the Syrian, Bp. Hilarion Alfeyev. Yes, still.
• Sunday Matins in the Byzantine Cathedral Rite, Alexander Lingas. Yes, still (and I have, alas, confirmation from the publisher that this will not be released on 28 June, as I suspected, and they frankly have no idea when it will be published, characterizing it only as “severely delayed”).
• The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, Hans Urs von Balthasar. I will note the following fun statistics about this particular book: it is volume one of seven, this volume alone is six hundred pages plus, and the “introduction” is over a hundred pages. I’m reading this because somebody made the professional suggestion that my interests in particular will ultimately be a lot more marketable if I can tie Balthasar in somehow. What I will say for now is that I really hope that I’m not someday told that I can’t claim to have read this unless I’ve done so in German; it’s going slowly enough in English.
• The Church of the Triune God: The Cyprus Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue.
• An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, St. John of Damascus (as found in the Schaff-edited Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers series).
• A Patristic Greek Reader, Rodney Whitacre.
• Hands of the Saddlemaker, Fr. Nicholas Samaras. I wound up at Fr. Samaras’ (as he prefers to be called) parish for Divine Liturgy the last day I was in New York for the Fellowship conference; this is a good story which I will tell later.

I also have various and sundry writing projects happening, scholarly and otherwise, some of which I might actually complete before the entropic cessation of the universe’s existence. My notes and answer key for Hansen & Quinn unit 3 I might even have done more quickly than that.

I hope to be able to distill the Fellowship experience into a magazine aricle; Prof. William Tighe is already doing the write-up for Touchstone, but we’ll see.

…and that’s the news from Lake Wifebegone, where the air conditioner is always on, the kitchen table is always messy, and the house always feels empty.