Book: The Western Front of the Eastern Church

[Peter_Mogila]

I just got in the mail today from an ebay auction the book: “The Western Front of the Eastern Church” by Barbara Skinner (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). I’ve just started to look through it and at first glace it looks quite well done and seem even handed between Catholic and Orthodox issues.

Has anyone here read it? It seems like a good source for issues related to the aftermath of the Union of Brest.

Peter

 

[Peter_Mogila]

The more I read Skinner’s book, the more I’m impressed with the research she has put into it and her knowledge of Orthodoxy/Eastern Catholicism. She explains the rationale for the latinizations that developed in the Ukrainian Catholic Church during that era as a understandable response to develop a separate identity from the Russian Church. As good as her book is, I think her nomenclature might possibly cause some discussion here. She uses “Ruthenian” to refer to what we would now call the UGCC and uses “Uniate” often. I have seen “Ruthenian” used that way before in older Catholic Church documents; similarly with “uniate.” But, it’s not what we normally see nowadays.

I’m more used to using “Ruthenian” to refer to Eastern Catholics in what is now Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic from the Union of Uzhorod. For that interesting history, there’s John Slivka’s book: “The History of the Greek Rite Catholics in Pannonia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Podkarpatska Rus’ 863-1949” online here:

archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheGreekRiteCatholicsByJohnSlivka

He’s the same person who collated the documents in Historical Mirror about their experiences when they came to America:

archive.org/details/HistoricalMirrorGreekRiteCatholics1884-1963

Back to Skinner’s book. Some additional info: There’s an interesting podcast by her from a talk she gave at Indiana University on the info from this book here:

podcast.iu.edu/Portal/PodcastPage.aspx?podid=79b16b3c-2e5e-4786-8188-85430c4f3f77

Peter

 

[Wesley7]

Those are the kind of books I’ve read and studied the past few years. I should be familiar with the content. For some reason, I began to comprehend the meaning of books without reading them. I have Rome,Constantinople,Moscow by Meyendorff.