Download or read book Cosmic Liturgy written by Hans Urs Von Balthasar and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maximus the Confessor, saint and martyr, is the theologian of synthesis: of Rome and Byzantium, of Eastern and Western theology, of antiquity and the Middle Ages, reexcavating the great treasures of Christian tradition, which at that time had been buried by imperial and ecclesial censure. Von Balthasar was an authority on the Church Fathers-Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, Augustine, and above all, Maximus the Confessor. This masterpiece on Maximus broke new ground at that time. Subsequent editions included new material from decades of research. This is the first English translation of the latest edition of this acclaimed work. This book presents a powerful, attractive, religiously compelling portrait of the thought of a major Christian theologian who might, for this book, have remained only an obscure name in the handbooks of patrology. It is based on an intelligent and careful reading of Maximus's own writings. Here the history of theology has become itself a way of theological reflection.
Download or read book The Liturgical Cosmos The World through the Lens of the Liturgy written by David Fagerberg and published by Emmaus Academic. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Church’s liturgy is an appropriate object for academic study, but it is first and foremost the object of the faithful’s participation in divine worship, the site of humanity’s deification by the Trinity. The liturgy is thus not just something that we can look at, but, like a window, it is also something we can look from, viewing other matters of Christian doctrine and practice—indeed, the entire created world—through the lens of the liturgy. In this collection of essays representing nearly two decades of writing and reflecting on liturgical theology, David Fagerberg sets out to explore the liturgical cosmos, attending to how the lex orandi of the liturgy illuminates and shapes the lex credendi of the Church’s faith and the lex vivendi of the Christian moral life. Addressing such topics as asceticism, beauty, Scripture, spirituality, sacrifice, and social renewal, The Liturgical Cosmos directs our gaze to the ways in which the abundant life that Christ came to offer—a life communicated sacramentally and celebrated cultically—is a life lived daily, and liturgically, as the Holy Spirit refreshes our world and conforms us to Christ, the image of the Father.
Download or read book Cosmic Prayer and Guided Transformation written by Robert Govaerts and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-08-29 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a realistic and thoroughly spiritual outlook upon the entire created reality. It lets us envisage that various created entities are participant in a relationship with God that becomes increasingly one of an intimate personal quality; that is, a relationship of love. It thus invites discernment that the universal reality is valuable in its own right and not only as a good for the use of humanity. Drawing mainly upon Scripture, ancient writers (especially Maximus the Confessor), as well as contemporary natural sciences, this book encourages the reader to perceive human salvation not as a lifting of humanity out of creation, but as a transformation into God's presence in the midst of the wider created order. It shows that Christian faith at its best does not exclude the wider creation but provides us with insight and hope for a harmonious being-in-God that is inclusive of creation. It shows that Christian faith can be a resource that helps overcome the ecological crisis.
Download or read book Cosmic Grace Humble Prayer written by Bartholomew I (Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople) and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2009-06-19 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer presents the powerful ecological vision of Patriarch Bartholomew, drawing together a comprehensive collection of his church statements and occasional addresses, some available in English only here. This second edition provides an updated selection of letters and addresses by the Patriarch, including such statements from 2003 to 2007. / Editor John Chryssavgis has organized these pieces chronologically and thematically, highlighting particular points of interest and importance. In addition, he provides a substantial historical and theological introduction to the initiatives and writings of Patriarch Bartholomew that also invites readers into the unparalleled environmental perspective of the Orthodox Church.
Download or read book Liturgy and Theology written by Nathan Grady Jennings and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship of liturgy to theology? The author describes the economic nature of liturgy in order to reimagine cosmology, sacrifice, the figural reading of Scripture, and metaphysical realism where liturgy itself enacts an apocalypse of transcendent realities.
Download or read book The Spirit of the Liturgy written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Softcover Edition with Index! Considered by Ratzinger devotees as his greatest work on the Liturgy, this profound and beautifully written treatment of the "great prayer of the Church" will help readers rediscover the Liturgy in all its hidden spiritual wealth and transcendent grandeur as the very center of our Christian life. Among the many liturgical issues that he covers in this work, Cardinal Ratzinger discusses fundamental misunderstandings of the Second Vatican Council's intentions for liturgical renewal, especially the orientation of prayer at the Eucharistic sacrifice, the placement of the tabernacle, and the posture of kneeling. Other important topics he discusses include the following: the essence of worship; Jewish roots and new elements of the Christian Liturgy; the historic and cosmic dimensions of the Liturgy; the relationship of the Liturgy to time and space; art, music, and the Liturgy; active participation of all the faithful; gestures, posture, and vestments. "My purpose here is to assist this renewal of understanding of the Liturgy. Its basic intentions coincide with what Guardini wanted to achieve. The only difference is that I have had to translate what Guardini did at the end of the First World War, in a totally different historical situation, into the context of our present-day questions, hopes, and dangers. Like Guardini, I am not attempting to involve myself with scholarly discussion and research. I am simply offering an aid to the understanding of the faith and to the right way to give the faith its central form of expression in the Liturgy." - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, from the preface
Download or read book Theology of the Liturgy written by Joseph Ratzinger and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 855 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major volume is a collection of the writings of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) on the theology of the Liturgy of the Church, a subject of preeminence to him as a theologian, professor and spiritual writer. It brings together all his writings on the subject, short and long, giving his views on liturgical matters and questions over many years and from various perspectives. He chose to have his writings on the Liturgy for the first volume published of his collected works (though listed as vol. 11) because, as he says in the Introduction: "The liturgy of the Church has been for me since my childhood the central reality of my life, and it became the center of my theological efforts. I chose fundamental theology as my field because I wanted first and foremost to examine thoroughly the question: Why do we believe? But also included from the beginning in this question was the other question of the right response to God and, thus, the question of the liturgy." By starting with the theme of liturgy in this volume, Ratzinger wants to highlight God's primacy, the absolute precedence of the theme of God. Beginning with a focus on the liturgy, he said, tells us that "God is first". He quotes from the Rule of St. Benedict, "Nothing is to be preferred to the liturgy", as a way of ordering priorities for the life of the Church and of every individual. He says that the fundamental question of the man who begins to understand himself correctly is: How must I encounter God? Thus learning the right way of worshipping is the gift par excellence that is given to us by the faith. The essential purpose of his writings on the liturgy is to place the liturgy in its larger context, which he presents in three concentric circles. First, the intrinsic interrelationship of Old and New Testament; without the connection to the Old Testament heritage, the Christian liturgy is incomprehensible. The second circle is the relationship to the religions of the world. The third circle is the cosmic character of the liturgy, which is more than the coming together of a circle of people: the liturgy is celebrated in the expanse of the cosmos, encompassing creation and history at the same time.
Download or read book The Whole Mystery of Christ written by Jordan Daniel Wood and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thoroughgoing examination of Maximus Confessor’s singular theological vision through the prism of Christ’s cosmic and historical Incarnation. Jordan Daniel Wood changes the trajectory of patristic scholarship with this comprehensive historical and systematic study of one of the most creative and profound thinkers of the patristic era: Maximus Confessor (560–662 CE). Wood's panoramic vantage on Maximus’s thought emulates the theological depth of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy while also serving as a corrective to that classic text. Maximus's theological vision may be summed up in his enigmatic assertion that “the Word of God, very God, wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of his Incarnation.” The Whole Mystery of Christ sets out to explicate this claim. Attentive to the various contexts in which Maximus thought and wrote—including the wisdom of earlier church fathers, conciliar developments in Christological and Trinitarian doctrine, monastic and ascetic ways of life, and prominent contemporary philosophical traditions—the book explores the relations between God’s act of creation and the Word’s historical Incarnation, between the analogy of being and Christology, and between history and the Fall, in addition to treating such topics as grace, deification, theological predication, and the ontology of nature versus personhood. Perhaps uniquely among Christian thinkers, Wood argues, Maximus envisions creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo in the event of the Word’s kenosis: the mystery of Christ is the revealed identity of the Word’s historical and cosmic Incarnation. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of patristics, historical theology, systematic theology, and Byzantine studies.
Download or read book On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ written by Saint Maximus (Confessor) and published by RSM Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides translations from St. Maximus' two main collections of theological reflections - his Ambigua (or Difficulties) and his Questions to Thalassius - plus one of his Christological opuscula, previously unavailable in English. The translations are accompanied by notes. --from back cover.
Download or read book Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration written by John Chryssavgis and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can Orthodox Christianity offer spiritual resources uniquely suited to the environmental concerns of today? This book makes the case emphatically that it can indeed. In addition to being the first substantial and comprehensive collection of essays, in any language, to address environmental issues from the Orthodox point of view, this volume (with contributions from many of the most influential theologians and philosophers in contemporary world Orthodoxy) will engage a wide audience, in academic as well as popular circles—resonating not only with Orthodox audiences but with all those in search of a fresh approach to environmental theory and ethics that can bring to bear the resources of ancient spirituality, often virtually unknown in the West, on modern challenges and dilemmas.
Download or read book Maximus the Confessor written by Paul M. Blowers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian" worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century—the repercussions of which cost him his life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.
Download or read book Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor written by Melchisedec Törönen and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2007-01-11 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major study of the work of St Maximus the Confessor, covering all the important areas of his thought, from Trinitarian theology to cosmology and spirituality.
Download or read book Living Cosmology written by Tucker, Mary Evelyn and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Worship as Body Language written by E. Elochukwu Uzukwu and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Worship sets an assembly in motion movement towards God in response to God's movement towards humans thus creating a resilient and caring community. Worship as Body Language brings the African community's experience of the body and its gestures together with the Christian liturgy, since worship and social action are closely related. The body language" or gestures of praise, adoration, contemplation, ritual dance, and care of the neighbor are meaningful to the ethnic group; African Christians tune into these body motions to express the one Christian faith. In Worship as Body Language, Father Uzukwu details how patterns of African ritual assemblies and sacred narratives have merged with Jewish, gospel, and early Church traditions to create living Christian communities and liturgies. Using a socio-historical method, this book sheds new light on liturgical action and theology, and suggests more transition rituals. It also provides samples of emergent African Christian liturgies that emphasize intense community participation with appropriate gestures. These local liturgies attest to the patristic principle that different customs actually confirm the unity of our faith in Christ. Scholars teaching and researching the foundations of the liturgy and liturgical inculturation, graduate students, and those organizing workshops on the regional, diocesan, or parish level will find Worship as Body Languagea ready handbook on the liturgy. It is also a useful textbook for introducing college students and seminarians to the anthropological, historical, and theological dimensions of the liturgy. Elochukwu E. Uzukwu, CSSp, ThD, lectures in liturgy and African theology in seminaries and Catholic universities in Nigeria, Congo, Zaire, and France. He is the author of Liturgy: Truly Christian, Truly African,and the editor of Bulletin of Ecumenical Theology. "
Download or read book Material Eucharist written by David Grumett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Eucharist interprets the Eucharist through its material elements of bread and wine. Drawing upon a rich variety of biblical, patristic, medieval, and modern texts and traditions, David Grumett brings together theological reflection and liturgical action and shows their mutual dependence. For both theologians and liturgists, a central concern is the matter out of which the created order has been made, from which issues of community and social justice are inseparable. The ingredients of bread and wine anticipate, in their harvesting and manufacture, the formal church liturgy, which is extended back into the world by the transformative priestly action of laypeople. Indeed, the transforming presence of Christ in the Eucharist as flesh and substance is theologically grounded in his transformative presence in the wider created order, as expressed in eucharistic giving and exchange between churches and their wider communities. Rooting the Eucharist in materiality suggests its primary context to be the death and resurrection of Christ in the power of the Spirit, in which its recipients may share. The many aspects of theology and liturgy with which the book deals have large implications for how the Eucharist is understood in a range of academic disciplines, and for how it is celebrated in churches today.
Download or read book Nature Praising God written by Dermot A. Lane and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 crisis, streets were emptied, churches closed, and a relationship with nature developed in which questions to be asked again in light of the crisis arose: Is God present in nature? Is communion with God in nature possible? Is there a relationship between the God of creation, the God of history, and the God we worship in Sunday liturgies? In Nature Praising God, Dermot Lane explores these questions by returning to the Bible. The Christian tradition shows that nature is understood as a living community, is graced by God, and has a sacramental character. He suggests that readers change their perception of how nature is traditionally regarded as a resource for human needs—and embrace a new way of praising God through an appreciation of and care for the myriad life forms on earth. The result of these explorations is the outline of a new theology of nature praising God, with lessons for the way we worship God in our churches today.
Download or read book Pedro Calder n de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe written by Rasmus Vangshardt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular. The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual. By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.
