The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. This study is the first to analyze how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. During the eleventh century, chroniclers in Kiev learned about the conversion of the Roman Empire by celebrating a series of distinctively Byzantine liturgical feasts. When the services concluded, and the clerics sought to compose a native history for their own people, they instinctively drew on the sacred stories that they sang at church. The result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus - a myth promulgated even today by the Russian government - which reproduced the Christian origins myth of the Byzantine Empire. The book uncovers this ritual subtext and reconstructs the intricate web of liturgical narratives that underlie this foundational text of pre-modern Slavic civilization.
Spirituality is a motion, a responsive movement of heart, mind, and spirit to the life of God moving within us. Starting from his Roman Catholic roots but working ecumenically, Bob Hurd explores this
This classic work, previously edited by Ronald Jasper and Geoffrey Cuming, has been a staple source in teaching liturgy to generations of students in colleges, seminaries, and universities. It has now
Sanctification is a central theme in the theology of both John and Charles Wesley. However, while John’s theology of sanctification has received much scholarly attention, significantly less has been p
Confession is a history of penance as a virtue and a sacrament in the United States from about 1634, when Catholicism arrived in Maryland, to 2015, fifty years after the major theological and discipli