The essentials …

… The One and Only: Andrew Louth on a New History of the Orthodox Church - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 As a form of Christianity, “Eastern Orthodoxy” is both familiar and unfamiliar, not because it is an exotic Christianity, but rather the reverse: it is a form of Christianity not ashamed of its history and of the way it must still carry with it a lot of baggage from its long past. In the modern Western world, marked by forgetfulness of the past, the Orthodox Church must seem a bit like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, the one who cannot forget anything.