About this item
An insider's account of the Eastern Orthodox Church, from its beginning in the era of Jesus and the Apostles to the modern age In this short, accessible account of the Eastern Orthodox Church, John McGuckin begins by tackling the question "What is the Church?" His answer is a clear, historically and theologically rooted portrait of what the Church is for Orthodox Christianity and how it differs from Western Christians' expectations. McGuckin explores the lived faith of generations, including sketches of some of the most important theological themes and individual personalities of the ancient and modern Church. He interweaves a personal approach throughout, offering to readers the experience of what it is like to enter an Orthodox church and witness its liturgy.
About the Author
V. Revd. Professor John Anthony McGuckin, is an Archpriest of the Orthodox Church in the Patriarchate of Romania's Western-European Archdiocese. He is currently Professor of Theology at Oxford University, and Nielsen Professor Emeritus at UTS and Columbia University New York. His academic career in theology and Church History began when he studied Philosophy at Heythrop College, London from 1970-72, and from there went on to read for a Divinity degree at the University of London, graduating with First Class Honours in 1975. For his doctoral researches at Durham University (1980) , he studied the politics and theology of the early Constantinian era, with a thesis on the thought of Lucius Caecilius Lactantius, the Emperor Constantine's pacifist Christian tutor and political advisor. While he was a student at Durham he published his first book, an English edition of the Theological Chapters of St. Symeon the New Theologian, the medieval Byzantine poet and mystic. Since then he has published thirty books on religious and historical themes, becoming internationally recognized as a leading interpreter of the Early Christian and Eastern Orthodox traditions. He has taught in many Universities both in America and in Europe, as Visiting Distinguished Professor or as Visiting Scholar; including Kiev, Sibiu, Bucharest, Oslo, Iasi, Cambridge, Belfast, Oxford, Yale, Sydney and Moscow. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1986, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1996. He was elected as the prestigious Luce Fellow in Early Christianity in 2006. He was awarded the Order of St. Stephen the Great, the Cross of Moldavia and Bukovina, by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2008; and was awarded the jewelled cross by Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America in 2012, on the occasion of his receipt of the Doctorate in Divinity Honoris Causa at St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary. He received the DLitt Honoris Causa from Lucian Blagea University, Sibiu in 2014.Among his publications are: The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (1986) ; St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (1994) ; At the Lighting of the Lamps: Hymns from the Ancient Church (1995, and repr. 1997) ; St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (2000) (Nominated for the 2002 Pollock Biography Prize) ; Standing in God's Holy Fire: The Spiritual Tradition of Byzantium (Orbis, 2001) ; The Book of Mystical Chapters (Shambhala, 2002) , The Westminster Handbook to Origen of Alexandria (WJK, 2004) and The Westminster Handbook To Patristic Theology (2004) . His large-scale study of Eastern Christianity, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Theology, and Spiritual Culture appeared from Blackwell-Wiley in the summer of 2007. He has edited the largest-ever English language Encyclopedia of the Orthodox Church, appearing from Blackwell-Wiley in 2010, and going through several editions since
