Andrew J. Summerson & Cyril Kennedy (eds), Eastern Catholic Theology in Action: Essays in Liturgy, Ecclesiology, and Ecumenism, Eastern Catholic Studies and Texts inaugural volume, Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 2024.

Abstract

I am an heir of an Eastern Catholic Church, if faraway on the peripheries, having grown up and spent my life in a “Latin” Church environment half a planet away. My honored father, Theodor Silvas, was of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church, and so was I according to the canon law of the time I was born and baptized. Patristic studies, especially of the Greek Fathers, reinforced my sensibility of the Christian East, and then wandering in the borderlands of ancient Armenia, Syriac Studies and contacts with the Coptic church wakened me to the so-called “Oriental” churches.

So it was with interest that I took up the invitation to review Eastern Catholic Theology in Action (“ECTA”). It has helped broaden and deepen my awareness of the many historical, cultural, political, ecclesiological, liturgical and theological ponderables attending those eastern churches which, after the collapse of the Union of the Council of Florence (1439), gradually made their way back, piecemeal, to communion with the See of Rome in the centuries that followed.

ECTA is the opening volume in a series dedicated to Eastern Catholic Church Studies, published by CUA Press. As such it reminds me of C.S. Lewis “Wood Between the Worlds” in The Magician’s Nephew. Any number of pools can be seen fading into the distance, so many portals into different worlds of exploration. Just so, ECTA is an eclectic collection of essays, accommodating writers of varying, complementary and occasionally contrary views.