Customer Reviews

The Orthodox Eastern Church

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I would like to write about the text of the paperback, not on the content: this is an edition of GeneralBooks who scanned the original book (that is available in pdf for the buyers - fortunately), passed it through OCR, and printed what came out. NO checking and NO formatting was done on the text. Even the exising formatting is often missing (footnotes follow mostly continously in the same row (!) the text of one-one page), titles may miss on the beginning of chapters, one part of the content disappeared (I am not even aware of OCR to do that!). Without the original scanned book, it is impossible to read. I wonder how much it would have added to the present price to just check for formatting and separating text from footnotes, nothing more. As it is now, I would not recommend it at all, but only to buy the pdf, and print it out at home. The present state of the book is simply inacceptable.

Pelikan is a challenge to read, because he allows the arguments of history to remain as complex as they were when they were raging.

But he does give a good feel for the spirit that formed the Orthodox Church as it exists today. It is treated objectively, and I suppose sympathetically. (I'm told he converted to Orthodoxy before he died).

Less complex discussions of Orthodoxy exist, especially Timothy Ware's books. There is also a very nice issue of Christian History magazine that gives a good overview.

This is the most serious discussion of Orthodox doctrine that I have seen.