Eastern Christianity: the Byzantine Tradition explores Eastern Orthodox Christianity both as a serious study and in a manner accessible to the widest range of readership. It is a superb introduction for contemporary western Christians, leading them from their own experience of Christ and the Church into that of the East and helping them to make important recognitions which other more polemical works on the subject fail to achieve.
All the important aspects of life as an Orthodox Christian are covered: history, approaches to belief, the sacraments and style of worship, the customs of the family and the main features of artistic and spiritual life.
The explanation of practise and belief are complete but avoid being merely an observer's view. Easterr Christianity breathes the spirit of the East in a quite remarkable way, giving a vivid feeling of the inner atmosphere of the life of Eastern Christians, such that they can be truly recognised as brothers.
Lawrence Cross was born in Sydney in 1943 and received the Catholic faith from the very Irish Australia Church of his childhood, but as a young man he fell in love with the Russian Byzantine tradition. It is there ever afterwards that he has expressed this same faith. Consequently, all his ecumenical and theological activity has been dedicated to the reconciliation of Orthodox and Catholic Christians.
He received most of his high school education on a choral scholarship from St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney. He graduated in Arts from the University of Syndye and later read History at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Doctor of Theology in the Melbourne College of Divinity. From 1963-1980 he was a member of the one-time Society of St Gerard. There his keen interest and love of Orthodoxy was deepened and extended. From 1981-2013 he taught theology at the Australian Catholic University and is presently an Honorary Fellow at that University. No one has been more active locally and internationally in the cause of Catholic/Orthodox reconciliation generating ecclesial events and projects to expand the Churches’ knowledge of eachother and their particular experience of Tradition. He is in demand as a speaker an international theological conferences, with a record that spans from Oxford to Serbia and from Moscow to Rome. His research continues to appear in theological jounrals world-wide, including The Ecumenical Review, One in Christ, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Irish Theological Quarterly, New Blackfriars, Studia Patristica, and theNewman Studies Journal, to name a few. He is the founder of the international conference series Orientale Lumen: Australasia and Oceania, and with Professor Pauline Allen, of Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church (now continuing as Early Christian Centuries).He is the pastor of the Russian Byzantine Catholics in Australia based in the Russian Catholic Community at Holy Trinity-St Nicholas, Melbourne. He was supported in all his work by his beloved Diane (d.2011) and has two sons, Nicholas and Patrick.
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