Looking East in Winter

Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition

By: Rowan Williams

Narrated by: Elliot Fitzpatrick

Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Bloomsbury presents Looking East in Winter by Rowan Williams, read by Elliot Fitzpatrick.

In many ways, we seem to be living in wintry times at present in the Western world. In this new book, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and a noted scholar of Eastern Christianity, introduces us to some aspects and personalities of the Orthodox Christian world, from the desert contemplatives of the fourth century to philosophers, novelists and activists of the modern era, that suggest where we might look for fresh light and warmth. He shows how this rich and diverse world opens up new ways of thinking about spirit and body, prayer and action, worship and social transformation, which go beyond the polarisations we take for granted.

Taking in the world of the great spiritual anthology, the Philokalia, and the explorations of Russian thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, discussing the witness of figures like Maria Skobtsova, murdered in a German concentration camp for her defence of Jewish refugees and the challenging theologies of modern Greek thinkers like John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras, Rowan Williams opens the door to a ‘climate and landscape of our humanity that can indeed be warmed and transfigured’.

This is an original and illuminating vision of a Christian world still none too familiar to Western believers and even to students of theology, showing how the deep-rooted themes of Eastern Christian thought can prompt new perspectives on our contemporary crises of imagination and hope.

©2021 Rowan Williams (P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Beautiful and Rich Exemplification of Eastern Christian thought

Rowan Williams always writes with incisive depth, clarity and charity, and this book, whoch reads somewhat like a collection of interrelated essays, beings his gifts and wisdom to bear on Eastern Orthodox Christian wisdom. He draws on the Philokalia's tradition of asceticism as learning to engage with reality without "passion" (acquisitiveness, aversion, ego projection ect.) as the way to come into and draw others into communion with reality, with God, amd with the whole material world. In later chaoters he brings to bear the riches of more recent centuries of Orthodox voices. Overall highly recommended.