Search Results (71)

The relationship between Scripture and the Liturgy remains one of the most extensively debated subjects in theological discourse. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, a divided Christendom witnessed the rise of a dichotomy between Scripture and Liturgy, as well as between the Word and the Sacrament. This dichotomy, however, is absent from the patristic thought, which perceives the unity and complementarity between Scripture and Liturgy, owing to their shared belonging to the one life of the Church—broadly defined as Tradition—and to the way they are understood and experienced as interconnected modes through which the singular Mystery of Jesus Christ is communicated to the faithful. The present study aims to demonstrate this unity by drawing on a substantial body of patristic writings, highlighting the fact that the life of the Church is one and is lived both as the rule of faith and the rule of prayer, and that through it, one and the same Christ communicates Himself to the faithful both through the Word and through the Holy Sacraments. For the Church Fathers, the Christian faith is not an abstract doctrine about Christ, but a real and personal encounter and communion with Him in the life of the Church. This patristic approach may offer a starting point for contemporary Christianity in addressing the current liturgical crisis and in rethinking and renewing future ecumenical dialogue. Such renewal presupposes a movement beyond secular formalism and nominalism, which have fostered excessive conceptualization and an antithetical view of Scripture and Liturgy, Word and Sacrament. Full article

Background: Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States (U.S.) and a major contributor to several cancers, including cervical, anal, penile, and oropharyngeal cancers. Although a safe and effective vaccine is available, HPV vaccination rates remain suboptimal, particularly among racial, ethnic, and immigrant minority groups. This study explored multiple factors, such as cultural, social, and structural influences, influencing HPV vaccine decision-making among Cape Verdean immigrant parents in the U.S., a population currently underrepresented in HPV research. Methods: Qualitative study using individual, in-depth interviews with Cape Verdean immigrant parents of children aged 11 to 17 years living in the U.S. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed thematically using the social ecological model (SEM) to identify barriers and facilitators at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and policy levels. Results: Forty-five Cape Verdean parents (27 mothers, 18 fathers) participated. Fathers were significantly older than mothers (50.0 vs. 41.1 years, p = 0.05). Most were married or partnered (60%), had at least a high school education (84.4%), and reported annual household incomes of US$50,000 or more (66.7%), with no significant gender differences. Nearly all spoke Creole at home (95.6%). Fathers had lower acculturation than mothers (p = 0.05), reflecting less adaptation to U.S. norms and language use. Most parents had limited knowledge of HPV and the vaccine, with gendered beliefs and misconceptions about risk. Only seven mothers (25.9%) reported receiving a provider recommendation; all indicated that their children had initiated vaccination (1 dose or more). Mothers were the primary decision-makers, though joint decision-making was common. Trust in providers was high, but poor communication and the lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate materials limited informed decision-making. Stigma, misinformation, and cultural taboos restricted open dialogue. Trusted sources of information included schools, churches, and Cape Verdean organizations. While parents valued the U.S. healthcare system, they noted gaps in public health messaging and provider engagement. Conclusions: Findings revealed that HPV vaccine uptake and hesitancy among Cape Verdean immigrant parents in the U.S. were influenced by individual beliefs, family dynamics, healthcare provider interactions, cultural norms, and structural barriers. These findings highlight the need for multilevel strategies such as culturally tailored education, community engagement, and improved provider communication to support informed vaccination decisions in this population. Full article

The theology of deification in the Christian tradition is fraught with misconceptions. Although it embodies the core teaching of the faith, it is not only a neglected theme of theology, but often critiqued as a Promethean distortion of the gospel and/or a semi-Pelagian heterodoxy. Hans Urs von Balthasar, through his examination of the teachings of the early Church Fathers, presents the doctrine in its Christocentric context, emphasizing its kenotic and inherently relational character. Deification is thus revealed as an antidote to the narrowly conceived notion of “justification” as salvation, which is rooted in a juridic understanding of God’s grace. Conceived as the dynamic incorporation of the believer into the life of Christ himself, deification is rightly understood as a present, existential process and thus far more than a mere eschatological hope. Full article

The core focus of the study of Patristics (generally also called Patrology) has been the teachings and practices of the so-called Fathers and Mothers of the early Christian Church (or the leading exponents of the Christian Faith, primarily from after the times of Jesus of Nazareth and the writings of the New Testament to the so-called Early Middle Ages (or the emergence of Islam) (e [...] Full article

St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) stands out among the Church Fathers as one of the last Christological martyrs. Maximus possessed one of the greatest minds of the Church’s first millennium. The greatest strength of Maximus’s Christology is that he presents a synthesis of all Christological contributions known to him while developing his own Christology of union in distinction. In order to flesh out his system of Christology, this essay works primarily with select works of Maximus’s, namely, the Small Theological and Polemical Works (Opuscula), the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, and the Mystagogy. It will demonstrate that Maximus’s Christology bears the following four predominant signatures: it is patristic, Incarnational, composite, and cosmic. All four features are interrelated, particularly in Maximus’s theory of the λόγοι (logology), and all four hold significant sway over the whole of his doctrine. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of how the Ressourcement movement has benefitted Maximian studies. Full article

This article aims to explain why, in some European representations of the Annunciation, a bundle of rays of light comes from the mouth of God the Father toward the head/ear of the Virgin Mary. In order to find a satisfactory answer to this problem, the author first studies a series of biblical, patristic, theological, and liturgical sources referring to the supernatural human conception of the Word of God in Mary’s immaculate womb. He then analyzes eleven images of the Annunciation that present this peculiarity. Finally, through a comparative analysis between the doctrinal texts and these exceptional images, the author concludes that the latter illustrate as visual metaphors the textual metaphors contained in the writings of some Church Fathers, medieval theologians, and liturgical hymnographers; that is to say, the beam of rays of light emitted by the mouth of the Most High to the Virgin’s head/ear metaphorizes the human conception/incarnation of the Word of God in the virginal womb of Mary. Full article

An arrangement of Patristic quoted sources translated from Greek into Syriac were used by Peter of Callinicus in his works against Damian of Alexandria within the sixth-century Tritheist Controversy. Exemplifying one useful role for a translator, the quotations have been extracted and saved from inaccessibility in Peter’s very hefty volumes and presented side-by-side, author-by-author in checked and (where necessary) revised English. This not only better clarifies the argumentative thrust of Peter’s diatribes and how he himself translates Greek into a Semitic tongue, but it will serve Patristic scholarship in showing how the thoughts of well-known Greek Fathers are conveyed in Syriac in the contexts of earlier theological debates. A key theme of this presentation is the Tritheist Controversy which broke out more than a hundred years after the acrimonious controversy over the Council of Chalcedon had cooled down. The focus is mainly on the dispute over the doctrine of the Trinity between the so-named miaphysites, the Syrian Patriarch Peter of Callinicus/um (d. 591) and Coptic Pope Damian of Alexandria (d. 605), which, in turn, led to the schism between Alexandria and Antioch lasting about 30 years. It comprises two parts: (i) A brief outline of the origins, narrative, and postlude of the Tritheist controversy of Peter with Damian and its doctrinal issues; (ii) identifying, enlisting and reproducing numerous seminal quotations in English from the works of earlier Church Fathers contained in Peter’s magnum opus in support and in refutation of (or ‘against’) Damian of Alexandria; and (iii) reflection on issues of translating Patristic texts. Full article

This article sheds light on the repercussions of the Proverbs sentence “Wisdom has built her house” on Christian doctrine and on the Marian iconography of the Annunciation. To achieve his objectives, the author uses a double comparative analysis as a methodology. To begin with, he analyzes a vast corpus of texts in which numerous Fathers, theologians, and liturgical hymnographers of Eastern and Western Churches interpret this biblical locution according to Mariological and Christological projections. Secondly, he analyzes eight pictorial Annunciations from the Italian Renaissance in which Mary’s house in Nazareth is depicted as a luxurious palace. As a result of these two sets of analyses, the author concludes that the interpretations of the Fathers, theologians, and hymnographers about the house built by Wisdom and the form of the house/palace in images of the Annunciation allude to the dogma of God the Son’s supernatural human conception/incarnation in Mary’s virginal womb. Full article

The epistle to the Ephesians, like other Christian texts, teaches that life in the new creation, although not yet fully manifest, is already powerfully and sufficiently available to the church. However, this epistle uniquely has the predominant description of this new life in terms of entering into the household, or family, of God. Ephesians 1–5 makes this evident in the specific use of family language, the clustering of certain word groups (such as terms associated with wrath and peace), and the connection between promise and inheritance. This paper focuses on the instructions to children and fathers (Eph 6:1–4), showing that the teaching on the church in familial terms as the locus of the new creation is intended to be the basis for the way children and fathers are commanded to live their new life in their families. The description of the church contrasts with that of those outside the church, indicating that Christians are adopted children of God the Father, while those outside are “sons of disobedience” (2:2) and “children of wrath” (2:3). The instructions for children to be obedient and for fathers not to provoke their children to anger are best understood in this context. Full article

The God on Mount Sinai is the most widely used figure in Christian Negative Theology, with Dionysius Areopagita being its most famous interpreter. As Denys Turner described in his work The Darkness of God, the Dionysian God dwelling in the darkness has an intimate relationship with the Sun in the “Cave Allegory” of Plato’s Republic. This paper clarifies the complex relationship between these two figures, which remains largely underexplored in Turner’s book. The Dionysian God has three kinds of divine darkness: the first one stems from the Neoplatonist Porphyrius, who reinterpreted the darkness of the Cave to defend a Platonic positive view of the material world; the second one is attributed to Church Father Origen, who applied the Platonic philosophy to re-interpret the God on Mount Sinai; and finally, the last divine darkness, inspired by the Life of Moses, written by Gregory of Nyssa, which reaches the ultimate negation of any light. Full article

This article offers a theological reflection on the leadership discourse of four senior evangelical leaders in the Church of England. The justification for a discourse-led approach within the discipline of practical theology is that discourse is itself a socially informed practice. Discourse is constructive for meaning-making and has ongoing constituting effect for practice. Thus, any theological bias found in evangelical discourse is of interest since that discourse has a practice-shaping effect. Using the method of content analysis, I undertake an audit of four leadership texts to find out how often God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are referenced. The content analysis reveals a quantitative disparity. The Person of the Spirit is referenced far less, and any references to Spirit are qualitatively limited. These quantitative results offer evidence to suggest that a full account of the Divine Move that is Spirit, and the leading activity of the Spirit, fails to be disclosed in these texts. I suggest that these findings indicate an imbalance in the discourse which I hope prompts evangelicals to further reflect on, and explore, the place of the Spirit in their theology and practice. Full article

This article attempts to document why the Virgin Mary is symbolically designated by the biblical figure “Ark of the Covenant” (Foederis Arca), as reflected in one of the invocations of the Litany of Loreto (Litaniae Lauretanae). To justify such a designation, the author refers to the systematic analysis of the patristic, theological, and hymnic sources of the Eastern and Western Churches, in which the Virgin Mary is labeled as the “Ark of the Covenant” for her virginal divine motherhood, her supreme holiness, and her supernatural privileges. The perfect coincidence, with which for more than a millennium the Fathers, theologians, and liturgical hymnographers of the Greek-Eastern and Latin Churches alluded to the Virgin Mary through this biblical symbol, demonstrates the strong coherence of the Mariological theses of the Christian doctrinal tradition on the person and spiritual attributes of the Virgin Mary. These coincident interpretations of the Fathers, theologians, and hymnographers of the Eastern and Western Churches will allow us to justify our iconographic interpretations of 10 European pictorial annunciations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in whose scenes a container appears, almost always with books inside: such circumstance allows us to conjecture that the intellectual authors of these paintings of the Annunciation included in them this container to illustrate, as a visual metaphor, the textual metaphor with which the Fathers, theologians, and hymnographers symbolized the Virgin Mary as the Ark of the Covenant containing the Legislator of the new covenant. Full article

Mandaeism is the only ancient Gnostic religion surviving to the present day from antiquity. ‘Gnosticism’ was a block of creative religious activity mostly responding to the early Christian teachings in unusual ways of cosmicizing Jesus, and presenting a challenge to the ancient church fathers in the first-to-third centuries CE. Mandaeism, by comparison, has roots from John the Baptist rather than Jesus, although it is also important to recognize that this baptizing movement emerged in part as a survival of a very old indigenous ethno-religious grouping from Mesopotamia, its followers eventually settling in Mesopotamia’s middle and southern regions. Indeed, much of the Mandaeans’ thought and practice, especially their rituals of water ablution, have deep origins going back to Sumer, Akkad and Babylonia, reflecting regionally wide influences from right across the Fertile Crescent. Mandaean culture and the Mandaic Aramaic language was of high report in the so-called Patristic period covered by this Special Issue, even in the Arabian Peninsula up until the rise of Islam (634 CE onward), and Mandaeans were honored as a third “People of the Book”—the Sabians (Ṣābeʾun; or ṣobba in modern Iraqi Arabic)—in the Qur’an (2:62; 5:69; 22:17); in the Muslim world, many Mandaic speakers switched language to colloquial Iraqi Arabic and (Arabicized) Persian. This article aims to raise some basic questions, relevant to Patristics, about aspects of relationships between Mandaeans and both early ‘mainstream’ Christians and the other large grouping, the Manichaeans. These questions first concern the common flight of the followers of John and Jesus just before the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem (66–70 CE) and the role of the woman Miriai; second, the extent to which John and his followers affected the direction of early Christianity, and the consequences this had for ‘Baptist’/Christian relationships into the Patristic period, with attention paid to Mandaean views of Jesus; third, the process of the formation of early Mandaeism as it combined Hellenistic-Palestinian and Mesopotamian elements; and fourth, the signs that the Mandaeans not only influenced Mesopotamian Christian baptismal sects but were crucial in the emergence Manichaeism (from the 230s CE in Persian-dominated Iraq). This article will finish by concentrating on Mandaean–Manichaean relations in the light of a little known and previously secret Mandaic text (Diwan Razia), best known as Mani or Sidra d-Mani within a larger collection of unnamed occult texts. On the basis of the Mandaeans’ texts, we maintain that both Jesus and Mani apparently left their fold in turn. Full article

This article examines the concepts of violence and religion as social phenomena of modernity. Religion and the church are presented not as specific organizations or denominations, but as important social institutions and are reflected in philosophical and anthropological terms. I carry out the idea that religion as a modern social institute in cooperation with other social communities can resist violence, especially its aggressive forms. Based on some philosophical theories, the causes of the emergence of the different forms of social violence, as well as definitions of violence, are explored. In this context, the article presents the ideas of Hanna Arendt, Carl von Clausewitz, Bertrand de Jouvenel, James Mill, and Max Weber. Special attention is paid to the conception of the mimetic origin of aggression and violence in “primitive” or “archaic religions” elaborated by the French philosopher René Girard. He compares the social roots of aggression and violence in these religions with the Biblical ones and prefers the latter for their potential in preventing and overcoming the imitation types of violence. Girard’s anthropological justification of the mentioned historical religious traditions is presented. A significant part of the paper is devoted to the views of the Eastern Church Fathers of Early Christianity, considered in the concurrence of their humanistic ideas with those of noted contemporary philosophers. I see meaningful ideas for preventing extreme forms of violence and aggression in the contemporary world in the doctrines of the Early Eastern and Byzantine Fathers, especially those of the classical patristic period. In this regard, this article presents the anthropological and humanistic teachings of Athanasius the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus. The Early Church Fathers’ ideas are analyzed from a philosophical point of view, as having rational and anthropological grounds which are relevant for the present day’s human existence. Full article

This study investigates a Byzantine embroidery fragment found in the Cathedral of St Elisabeth in Košice, Slovakia, which is believed to come from a 15th-century epitrachelion. Through interdisciplinary research, including art historical analysis, archival studies, and material research, the embroidery was identified as a rare example of Byzantine liturgical textile art in Slovakia. The iconography includes Archangel Gabriel and four Eastern Church Fathers. Comparative studies suggest possible origins in Greek or Romanian monastic workshops. Despite the information provided by radiocarbon dating and stylistic comparisons, the embroidery’s precise provenance and historical context invite further research. Full article