(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best christian orthodoxy books

I use A Psalter for Prayer and wholeheartedly recommend it. I have this version. The cover is quite stiff but it loosens up over time if you use it regularly. It has the traditional prayers printed at the end of each kathisma in Slavonic psalters. They're a very nice addition and it is the only English-language psalter that has these prayers in. As an example, here are the prayers after the First Kathisma (Psalms 1-8):

>Prayers After the First Kathisma
>
>Conceived in iniquities, prodigal that I am, I dare not gaze upon the heights of heaven; yet, confident of Thy love for mankind, I cry: O God, cleanse me and save me, a sinner!
>
>If the righteous man can hardly be saved, where shall I, a sinner, find myself? I have not borne the burdens and heat of the day; yet number me among them that were hired at the eleventh hour, O God, and save me! Glory.
>
>Thy Fatherly embrace do Thou hasten to open unto me, who have wantonly wasted my life as did the Prodigal, and who now gazeth upon the inexhaustible wealth of Thy mercy, O Savior. Reject not my heart in its poverty, for with compunction I cry unto Thee, O Lord: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before Thee. Both now.
>
>O all-holy Virgin, hope of Christians, with the heavenly hosts unceasingly entreat God, to Whom thou gavest birth in manner past understanding and recounting, that He grant remission of sins and amendment of life unto all of us who with faith and love ever honor thee.
>
>O MASTER, Almighty, Unapproachable, Origin of light, and Power beyond comprehension, Who art the Father of the hypostatic Word and from Whom came forth the Spirit Who is one with Thee in power; Who, for the sake of the mercy of Thy loving-kindness and Thine ineffable goodness, hast not scorned human nature, which is held fast in the darkness of sin, but hast illumined the world with the divine beacons of Thy sacred teachings, the Law and the Prophets; Who in latter times wast well pleased for Thine only-begotten Son to shine forth upon us in the flesh and guide us to the effulgence of Thy glorious light, may Thine ears be attentive unto the voice of our supplication; and grant, O Lord, that we may pass the whole night of this present life with a vigilant and watchful heart, awaiting the coming of Thy Son and our God, the Judge of all. And may we, without having lain down to sleep, but keeping vigil and upright, enter together into His joy, where the voice is unending of them that behold the ineffable beauty of Thy face. For Thou art a good God and the Lover of man- kind, and unto Thee do we ascribe glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; both now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

If you have any questions about it I'd be happy to answer.

Possible downsides are (1) if you don't like traditional thee/thou English, and (2) it is not used in many parishes yet as its a fairly new translation, so if you're looking to use the same translation as is used in your parish liturgy, this probably isn't it.

Be careful about what you bought, it's solid stuff, but those translations are from the 19th century and may not be very clear.

If you want something manageable like an anthology, I would recommend these. They're organized by topic so it's easy to look up stuff you're particularly interested in.

• Documents in Early Christian Thought, ed. Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer
  
  Miles was a renowned patristics scholar at Oxford. He also has a good introduction to the Church Fathers here. Another good intro to the Church Fathers is Boniface Ramsey's Beginning to Read the Fathers. (It was revised recently but for the sake of cost, IDK how necessary it is to get the newest edition.)
  
  
• The Early Christian Fathers, ed. Henry Bettenson
  
  From the Apostolic Age to Athanasius.
  
  
• The Later Christian Fathers, ed. Henry Bettenson
  
  Post-Nicene stuff. It stops at Chalcedon with Leo the Great's tome.
  
  
• This series from Fortress Press is good: Sources of Early Christian Thought. Its a series of anthologies organized by topic. So instead of one-volume anthologies with multiple topics, it's one anthology for the Trinity, Christology, etc. which allows for something more in depth.
  
  
• Finally, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press publishes a Popular Patristics Series. It features an edition of Athanasius' On the Incarnation with an introduction by CS Lewis himself!
  
  As to really important figures (I'm just listing what comes to mind):
  
  
• Origen
  
  
• Irenaeus
  
  
• Athanasius
  
  
• Augustine
  
  
• The "Cappadocian Fathers" (Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great)
  
  
• John Chrysostom. In Orhodoxy, Chrysostom is often grouped with Gregory Naziansus and Basil the Great as the "Three Holy Heirarchs", as the tradition's seminal bishops.
  
  
• Similar to the Three Holy Hierarchs, Catholicism recognizes the "Four Latin Doctors" for their influence: Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great.

Greetings fellow NorCalian! Continuing to attend the services is a great way to learn more. This next week is an especially good time as it’s Holy Week. Most parishes will have numerous services leading up to the grand finale on Saturday night for Pascha (Easter) (ours falls on a different day most years because we follow the Julian calendar dating). It’s a truly beautiful and unparalleled service and I’d highly recommend it if you can make it. Wear comfy shoes!

There’s a lot of great books out there as well. Check out the sidebar for some recommendations. A personal favorite for me (that I’ve read multiple times) is “The Orthodox Way”.

I haven't read it personally, but a good friend whose judgment I trust has spoken positively about Robert Letham's Through Western Eyes: Eastern Orthodoxy: A Reformed Perspective. Ligonier has a pretty good review of it.

Here is a secular historian and anthropologist from the university of Dartmouth that you might find intersting.

This first one is focused on a lot of this history in the Tlinglit culture, not Aleut, which is intersting as they are the Alaskans that were more resistant to Christanity under the Russian colonial period and didn't convert enmass until the American colonial period. And interestingly enough, they embraced Orthodox Christanity as a way to perserve, in their minds, their native Tlingit culture that the Anglo Americans were trying to forcefully remove from society. The potlatch will tie into this book

https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Eternal-Orthodox-Christianity-Centuries/dp/0295993863

I haven't read this one yet, but it's the book he did before the first on,e as the preliminary resource, I mentioned and it's primarily focused on the potlatch in Tlingit culture in the 19th century. I don't know, but if it's focused on all of the 19th century, I think Christanity would enter the story at some point.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0295994894/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0295994894

You might also like this text that argues that Orthodox Christanity, particularly the Greek Fathers of Antiquity, shared similar metaphysical views with the Alaskan animist shamanistic tradition, which very well could apply to other Pacific northwest peoples, but I would just be making an educated guess when saying so.

https://www.amazon.com/Mask-Icon-Transformation-Arctic/dp/1885652631/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=from+mask+to+icon+holy+cross&qid=1570408788&sr=8-3

You also might like this book by a secular historian and ethnologist on the transition between shamanism to Orthodoxy in Alaska and eastern Siberia, again it might apply to the Yakama story but it might not. This one runs pretty expensive though.

https://www.amazon.com/Shamanism-Christianity-Encounters-Orthodox-1820-1917/dp/0313309604/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?keywords=Andrei+Znamenski&qid=1570409521&s=books&sr=1-6

On Prayer by Elder Sophrony is a real good book. It's pretty dense and needs to be taken slowly, but it's amazing. He was a wonderful theologian and truly knew prayer. I highly recommend his writings

That book is a classic. It's old, and some of the translations show that age, but it's still one of the most comprehensive liturgical books available in English.

In addition to a liturgical book like that one, you might want to get a commentary that explains what everything going on liturgically means. I would recommend Nicholas Cabasilas' The Life in Christ, his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, and Hieromonk Gregorios of Koutloumousiou's The Divine Liturgy: A Commentary in the Light of the Fathers.

The Orthodox church features heavily in the Brothers Karmazov and there are a lot of great books about it.

The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware is an overview of their practices and beliefs and how they affect life as a whole. It references the Brothers K a lot, especially the life of Father Zosima. The themes of Dostoyevsky are fundamentally rooted in Orthodox tradition. This book takes those same ideas and goes much deeper into them. The same author has another book on the history of the church that is pretty good too.

Everyday Saints was a recent nonfiction bestseller in Russia about monastics living under soviet occupation. It's beautifully written. It reminded me a lot of Brothers K. It's a sprawl of Russians balancing drama with weighty religious themes.

But neither of those are in the literary cannon. For classic literature with similar themes I'd highly reccomend Moby Dick. The book is so famous that people forget how good it is. It's one of the greatest works of American Literature ever. The prose is a massive step up from translations of Dostoevsky while covering the same themes as Brothers K just as deeply.

Also, if you like Brothers K you'll like all his other works. Notes from Underground is my favorite and very short. But they're all good. Tolstoy is great too and has much better prose if you're down to read another giant book. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are both solid members of the cannon.

Shakespeare's plays might be too short to count but all his works cover the same themes too.

Those interested in this topic would do well to read the book Everyday Saints. And Father Arseny. The revolution was utter destruction, but did not come out of the blue. As far as the Church is concerned, and this Father Arseny explains beautifully, the revolution was a result of the clergy especially and the laity forgetting God, living an ungodly life, ... So the Church was in a bad state before the revolution and the revolution nearly destroyed what was left of it. Expecting everything to be rosy right away is, well, expecting somewhat of a miracle! And so far as I understand, much of the Russian clergy understands this quite well. The ones who survived Communism know what it's like to keep the flame burning despite dire circumstances, and they know that today's circumstances though better, are still dire.

This might be a start: http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/st_gregory_palamas_2nd_sunday_of_lent

The best source I have come across for a discussion of how grace and free will were understood in the early Church is in Father Seraphim Rose' book, The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. The book traces the roots of divergence in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic beliefs. A more thorough discussion could be found in Protopresbyter Michael Pomazanski's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology.

If anyone would like another book recommendation, Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy is a collection of essays on this subject, including essays on the distinction between essence and energies in both St. Basil the Great and St. Maximus the Confessor.

I recently read Fr. Alexander Schmemann's The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy.

I thought it was a pretty good, fairly in-depth overview of Orthodox history, from 33AD to the mid-20th Century (though most of the focus is up through Byzantium; the closer to the present he gets, the less in-depth he goes, IIRC). In addition, I liked how Schmemann didn't shy away from the problems the Church has experienced, but, at the same time, also offered context to help the reader understand why some decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.

1. not at all :) Everyone is welcomed. Just make sure to go at a time when the parish priest is there to show you round.
   
   
2. There are many good ones in the side menu of this subreddit. For muslims i would also recommend "The Orthodox Church in the Arab world". An excellent resource that provides insight into the lives of those who lived in muslim dominated lands for centuries.
   
   
3. The Orthodox Study Bible. Based on KJV. The differences are in the footnotes i believe. Not in the text itself.
   
   
4. I think you are referring to the Didache. We like the works from the saints of the church. There are a myriad of those. You could start with the homilies of St John Chrysostom for example and go from there,.

The Romanian Orthodox Elder Cleopa addressed the following question in The Truth of Our Faith: On the Christian Mysteries:

>Some people say that [Baptism] is not a mystery but only a symbol, or symbolic practice, which represents purification from sin. They say that, simply, faith is strengthened through Baptism, that it is merely a pledge one makes that he has repented, or that the act of baptism is like an inheritance, a seal of repentance. Purification from sin, however, is not effected through Baptism but by faith ... Faith, not Baptism, ought to be the principle which transforms man into a new being and saves him ...

Elder Cleopa answers:

>Christian Baptism is a holy Mystery and not a symbol, inasmuch as the Saviour called it a "birth from above" [see note below], on account of the fact that by it man is cleansed from sin and made holy (John 3:3-7). The Apostle Paul calls it "newness of life" (Romans 6:3-5) by the "renewing of the Holy Ghost" (Titus 3:5). The Apostle Peter says clearly that Baptism is received "for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38), and that it is not simply a symbol or washing of the body, as it appears to some, but is a true spiritual birth. Baptism, he says, "saves not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God" (1 Peter 3:21).

Regarding the Elder's quote of John 3:3 as referring to being "born from above" rather than "born again", he is correct. The Greek γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν can mean "born from above" or "born from the beginning". The sense Jesus intended was the former, but Nicodemus understood the latter - which better explains some of his confusion in his talk with Jesus. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that Jesus never actually said that one must be "born again" - he really said "born from above".

>I got tired of all the anti-Western bias that I found in Orthodox writers. It's like Western is used as a pejorative term in Orthodoxy.

This originates in Russia and is spread to Greece in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don't know if you've ever read Gregory Freeze's The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, but he details the Latinization of Russian seminaries under Peter the Great and Empress Anna in the 20s and 30s. When the clergy finally revolted against these impositions, there began the creation of an anti-Western (=anti-novel reforms) sentiment in Russian theology. This found its way over to Greece eventually. You can see it especially in people like Fr. John Romanides.

Father Arseny is about a man who became a saint in the Russian gulags. The setting sounds depressing, but the book is really full of hope and reveals the heart of an Orthodox Christian.

In the past, Reformed/evangelical - Orthodox interaction was really rare. But there are lots of good books on the subject now - where both "sides" do not engage in polemic attacks and misrepresent each other. The books I'm listing are Protestant evaluations of the Orthodox or Protestant introductions to Orthodoxy that come from this attitude of dialogue and charity.

• Through Western Eyes: Eastern Orthodoxy: A Reformed Perspective by Robert Letham - this book is the most Reformed of the bunch and has been endorsed by Carl Trueman and Gerald Bray among others
  
  
• Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective by Daniel Clendenin - Clendenin has also edited an anthology of contemporary Orthodox theology
  
  
• Eastern Orthodoxy through Western Eyes by Donald Fairbairn
  
  
• Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition by James R. Payton
  
  
• Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism (Counterpoints) - part of Zondervan's helpful series, conveniently structured
  

This is my favorite introductory book that covers the basics.

For primary sources in regards to the Fathers that gave Eastern Orthodoxy its intellectual shape:

Origen: On First Principles
Gregory of Nyssa: On the Soul and Resurrection and On the Making of Man
Athanasius: On the Incarnation

For more contemporary works, I’d suggest David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God and That All Shall Be Saved

A book about a heroic soul named Fr. Arseny. May it edify you like it has edified me.

https://www.amazon.com/Father-Arseny-1893-1973-Narratives-Concerning/dp/0881411809

On Earth as in Heaven is a great book on Christian environmentalism and climate change written by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew of Constantinople, who has been working on environmental issues for 25+ years.

On The Incarnation by Athanasius of Alexandria is a must for all Orthodox.

Fr. Thomas Hopko's The Orthodox Faith Volume 1-4

The Arena: Guidelines for Spiritual and Monastic Life


The Way of a Pilgrim: and The Pilgrim Continues His Way

Nicholas Cabasilas, in his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, identifies the Supplices te rogamus ("In humble prayer we ask you...") as an epiclesis in the Roman Canon (which is now rarely used because Eucharistic Prayer III is one minute shorter). The other three new anaphoras that were composed in the 60s, as noted by others, all have an explicit, Byzantine-style epiclesis.

Here are links for books on Christianity and environmentalism by the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope. The pope's writing is free.

https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Heaven-Initiatives-Christianity-Contemporary/dp/0823238857

https://laudatosi.com/watch

Here is a lecture on this topic from an Orthodox priest.

https://youtu.be/BF6SV52BNpA

And here is a documentary on the environmental work of the Orthodox Bishop of Constantinople.

https://youtu.be/gFpXuwmLiBE

It's not only history, but I like The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy for both history and an introduction to Orthodoxy.

The Mystery of Faith was my favorite book as a seeker and catechumen.

Orthodox Christian religioux mightily resist the suggestion that their practices resemble Eastern ones, let alone that they originated there. On the other hand, here's a book of essays comparing Orthodox Christian with Sufi practices:

https://www.amazon.com/Paths-Heart-Sufism-Christian-East/dp/0941532437

For a really intersting discussion of this, see Fr. Schmemann's book The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy

Fr. Schmemann, and. Fr. Hopko after him, would both contend that Orthodoxy has still not recovered from the fall of Constantinople.

Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Fr Michael Pomazansky

Check out "The Orthodox Way" by Kallistos Ware

Within the Eastern Orthodox faith, we believe that miracles are an everyday occurrence. Read, for example, Father Arseny: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father or Everyday Saints

Just finished: Father Arseny, 1893-1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father : Being the Narratives Compiled by the Servant of God Alexander Concerning His Spiritual Father

Next up: The End Is Near...Or Maybe Not!

Mountain of Silence - by Kyriakos Markides

https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Silence-Search-Orthodox-Spirituality/dp/0385500920

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Fr Arseny: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father

https://www.amazon.com/Father-Arseny-1893-1973-Narratives-Concerning/dp/0881411809

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The Orthodox Church - Timothy Ware

https://www.amazon.com/Orthodox-Church-New-Timothy-Ware/dp/0140146563

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Byzantine Thought and Art - Constantine Cavarnos

https://www.amazon.com/Byzantine-Thought-Art-Constantine-Cavarnos/dp/0914744224