When I was studying for my PhD, I remember a priest asking me, in the back of the sanctuary of my father’s parish in the Chicagoland area, “What are you studying?” I told him, “contemporary Orthodox theology.” He repeated my answer in a sardonic tone, somewhat incredulous that such a thing as contemporary Orthodox theology even existed. The subtext of his response, of course, was that there is no such thing as contemporary Orthodox theology: there are the fathers of the Church, as if all thinking in Orthodoxy stopped in the fifteenth century, and today there are the gerontes, who are examples of the living experiential theology of which the fathers speak.