Those intimately familiar with the writings and lectures of Father Alexander Schmemann will readily admit that he often looked at psychology with a skeptical eye. Nevertheless, one should not hastily conclude that Father Schmemann was unaware of the psychological dimensions of liturgical worship.

The French theologian Olivier Clément was born in France in the region of Languedoc into a family that was, in its apparent atheism, far removed from his future life of faith. Despite this upbringing and Clément’s early self-identification as a Mediterranean pagan, his early life was illumined with brilliant flashes of a light from another Sun.

Father Alexander Schmemann died in 1983, long before the resurgence of the Orthodox Churches in Eastern Europe could be realistically imagined, with what this might mean for the emergence of a powerful Orthodox voice worldwide. Today, global Orthodoxy is more free than it has been in centuries and—despite continuing divisions—has the ability to start coming together to find and speak in its own voice, as the Holy and Great Council in Crete 2016 at least haltingly demonstrated.

The Orthodox Fraternity in Western Europe was born and took form in a specific historical context: the arrival in Western Europe of immigrants from several Orthodox countries. There were the Greeks and Russians first, then Serbs, Romanians, and Lebanese. The settlement of these Orthodox Christians in Western Europe resulted in the juxtaposition of several jurisdictions, each representing its ethnic group.

From my early childhood I felt called to the priesthood. My family—my parents and brothers—were all involved in the life of the Church, serving in a number of capacities. My father served on parish councils, my mother served as a choir director, and my brothers served in the sanctuary or sang in the choir.

There is only one life. But since we are not separated from anyone, we can have a privileged connection with one or another deceased human person with whom we are “one.” We can “remember” what happened to that person.

The reader who engages with Father Alexander Schmemann’s mariological thought—as articulated primarily in The Virgin Mary, the third volume of his Celebration of Faith trilogy—encounters a challenge. The challenge is to reconcile Father Schmemann’s treatment of the issue of women’s clerical ordination with his theological reflection on the place of the Theotokos within Orthodox theology and worship.

Thirty-five years have elapsed since the untimely passing of Father Alexander Schmemann, but there seems to be a consensus that his legacy remains alive and well in both the Church and the academy. Since church leaders and scholars generally take Schmemann’s influence for granted, rare is the attempt to review the impact of his thought on the liturgy.

Translated by Liesl Coffin Behr

There’s a tradition in Mahayana Buddhism that the Buddha once gave a sermon without uttering a single word. An expectant assembly had gathered around him. Some of them may have sensed from observing him that something remarkable had happened.

The great French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément was born in the village of Aniane in the Languedoc region of southwestern France to a non-religious family. “I grew up in an environment in which Christianity played no part. I was not baptized, and received no religious instruction.” Attracted first by poetry, especially that of Rainer Maria Rilke, and then by the Bible, he spent his twenties exploring the religious traditions of India.

When is an age “dark”? It was the great Renaissance scholar Petrarch who, in the 1330s, first used the term “Dark Age” to describe his own time, a epoch he saw in sharp contrast to the bright glories of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. Within a hundred years, historians such as Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo developed a three-tiered view of history: a long period of darkness bookended by the glories of classical antiquity and the hope of Renaissance.