At Jupiter, in the Panini section, taking notes on assigned reading (Schmemann’s For the Life of the World) for seminary. The beer is my favorite, Moonlight Brewing’s Lunatic Lager.
It’s a beautiful day to be reading outdoors in Berkeley, one of my last few days here, so I’m enjoying it!
Great thoughts for both the Schmemann enthusiast and the Schmemann skeptic. On the one hand you remind the enthusiast that the book really isn’t all that great, that it’s certainly not the kind of in-depth patristic study you ideally would have seminarians read, and that Fr. Alexander really had some flaws, like getting the eminent theologian and patristic scholar Fr. Georges Florovsky fired from SVS. On the other hand, you mention some of his masterful prose and that it’s really more a product of its time as an attempt to reach out to non-Orthodox Christians with a presentation of the sacramental life. And there’s beer. Great post.