released 5/3/2019
In 2019 Mars Hill Audio released an audiobook edition of For the Life of the World, by Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. His book asks a set of questions about “Christianity and culture” that typically don’t get asked, questions that re-center our lives in gratitude and worship. Schmemann understood that we can’t understand what the world is — and what we should do in the world — unless we understand what the Church is. He wrote: “Christianity consists not in bestowing on each the possibility of ‘personal perfection’ but first of all in calling and commanding Christians to be the Church — ‘a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a chosen race’ — to manifest and confess the presence of Christ and his kingdom in the world.” On this Friday Feature, Fr. Chad Hatfield of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and Peter Leithart of the Theopolis Institute discuss the book with Ken Myers.
20 minutes
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More to hear . . .
You might think that a book about liturgical theology would have little to say about the Church’s mission in the world. To the contrary, says theologian David Fagerberg: “The Church is the world in the course of transfiguration.” And thus: “The liturgical cult does not exist for itself, it exists for the sake of the world, for the sake of understanding and transforming the world. . . . There is bidirectional traffic in every liturgy. Within the sacred sphere we glimpse under sacramental veil the homage that matter can pay to God — water, oil, bread, hand laying, icon, incense, brick and glass, assembled bodies. Having seen this, we treat all material objects with new reverence.” On this Friday Feature, David Fagerberg talks with Ken Myers about how Alexander Schmemann — especially in his book For the Life of the World — illuminated such a view of liturgy, the Church, and the Kingdom of God.
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