Significant books
Fr Chris tagged me on Monday but I missed it until Derek played

Books that have been particularly formative in your faith journey.

• The Bible, not that I’m an expert.
• The old Prayer Book, Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. The Anglican roots of this blogger’s Catholic spirituality.
• The Missal.
• The breviary in various forms, right now Winfred Douglas’s translation of the Monastic Diurnal.
• The old Roman Catholic catechisms. SS. Thomas Aquinas and Alphonsus Liguori in freeze-dried rations form as Fulton Sheen put it.
• Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God.
• The Way of a Pilgrim, not that I became a Jesus-prayer devotée but it showed me Russian Orthodoxy as a living tradition.
• Kallistos (Ware)’s The Orthodox Church. He fudges on contraception (Roman Catholic moral theology is the gold standard) but not a bad book.
• ‘Through the prayers of our holy fathers...’ The prayers of SS. Basil, John Chrysostom, John Damascene and other Church Fathers in the service books of the Byzantine Rite.
• Not of This World for introducing me to René Guénon’s traditionalism and, picking up where the Pilgrim left off, articulating a Catholic traditionalism — though that’s not how Fr Seraphim (Rose)’s followers would put it — that acknowledges the hippies had a point, a third-way alternative to the culture wars as popularly understood much as my libertarianism is in politics.
• The same writer’s The Soul After Death is not without its problems (the notion of praying somebody out of hell is heresy because it denies free will just like universalism — but one may believe in the possibility that there are no people there — and the objections to purgatory are silly; prayer for the dead only makes sense if there is an intermediate state) but he answers some questions and offers interesting — and orthodox — speculations about the afterlife.

None but churchgoers seemed abroad ... undergraduates and graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English church-going pace ... holding, bound in black lamb-skin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St. Barnabas, St. Columba, St. Aloysius, St. Mary’s, Pusey House, Blackfriars and heaven knows where besides, to restored Norman and revived Gothic, to travesties of Venice and Athens, all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race.

Labels: Anglicanism, books, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith