Andrew Hofer – författare

The Word made flesh is manifested in the lives of those dedicated to his proclamation. The Power of Patristic Preaching: The Word in Our Flesh presents seven early preachers who show, by life and speech, the divine Word's power at work in weak human life.The book is inspired by this question preached by Origen, "For what does it profit if I should say that Jesus has come in that flesh alone which he received from Mary and I should not show also that he has come in this flesh of mine?" In seven chapters, The Power of Patristic Preaching studies the exemplars of Origen for holiness, Ephrem for the humility of repentance, Gregory of Nazianzus for purification and faith, John Chrysostom for the hope of salvation, Augustine for love, Leo the Great for love of the poor and the weak, and Gregory the Great for accepting our own weakness.With an emphasis on the incarnation, deification through the virtues, and proclamation, The Power of Patristic Preaching serves as a resource for those dedicated to the ministry of the Word (clerical, religious, and lay), and as a text for students of early Christian theology and practices. A Catholic work for a broad ecumenical audience, the book gives a cry from the heart in a suffering Church traveling through a world that is passing away.

The experience of the pastoral leaders of the Early Church is wide and deep. In loving obedience to Christ’s command to make disciples, they expand into geographical locations both urban and rural, across linguistic and social boundaries. Their views are refined by the fires of martyrdom, purified by asceticism, and perfected by the pressures that the care of souls lays upon them. Their preaching, teaching, and witness is hard won by these experiences. To fail to engage with them impoverishes the Christian imagination that aims to answer the "how" and "why" of pastoral care. The Pastoral Theology of the Early Church proposes a selection of these early guides in pastoral theology for Christian leaders, both present and future. The selection of Greek, Latin, and Syriac authors from the first millennium treats themes as broad as Christian Initiation, the Church’s relationship to public officials, and the care owed to the families of infants who have died.The Pastoral Theology of the Early Church will aid students preparing for ministry and as well as seasoned pastors and pastoral ministers by offering a close look at the early Church’s perennial wisdom in action across differing pastoral contexts. Scholars and interested readers of the early Church will benefit from the surprising, varied situations and themes these leaders tackled head on for the sake of the Gospel.

Scholars have often been quick to acknowledge Thomas Aquinas's distinctive retrieval of Aristotle's Greek philosophical heritage. Often lagging, however, has been a proper appreciation of both his originality and indebtedness in appropriating the great theological insights of the Greek Fathers of the Church. In a similar way to his integration of the Aristotelian philosophical corpus, Aquinas successfully interwove the often newly received and translated Greek patristic sources into a thirteenth-century theological framework, one dominated by the Latin Fathers. His use of the Greek Fathers definitively shaped his exposition of sacra doctrina in the fundamental areas of God and creation, Trinitarian theology, the moral life, and Christ and the Sacraments.For the sake of filling this lacuna and of piquing scholarly interest in Aquinas's relation to the Fathers of the Christian East, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies co-sponsored an international gathering of scholars that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Sensitive to the commonalities and the differences between Aquinas and the Greek Fathers, the essays in this volume have sprung from the theme of this conference and offer a harvest of some of the conference's fruits. At long last, scholars have a rich volume of diverse, penetrating essays that both underscore Aquinas's unique standing among the Latin scholastics in relationship to the Greek Fathers and point the way toward avenues of further study.