Apocalypse of Wisdom

An important new book for the new evangelization, written by one of MAI's fellows Keith Lemna PhD, has just been released by Angelico Press.  Today's western mindset lives in a world that is unintelligible from the perspective of reality itself.  This "disenchanted" worldview we have inherited from Enlightenment Europe means we have lost access to the wisdom necessary to seeing meaning in the world and in our lives.  This makes it all the more difficult to propose Jesus Christ to modern ears.  Christians need to be restored in our understanding the world as God has created it, rather than in terms of its reduction to lifeless matter if we are going to help others others to see the logic of the world as this great drama of creation, fall and redemption.  Dr. Lemna's book is an indispensible contribution to this effort.  Following is the Press Release:

Angelico Press Announces:

The Apocalypse of Wisdom:  Louis Bouyer’s Theological Recovery of the Cosmos

KEITH LEMNA

526 pages
Paper (ISBN 978-1-62138-471-7): $22.95 / £19.50
Cloth (ISBN 978-1-62138-472-4 ): $32.00 / £26.50

Get the book.

ALTHOUGH THE FRENCH ORATORIAN PRIEST LOUIS BOUYER was one of the most comprehensive, influential, and prescient theologians of the twentieth century, only in recent years have some major European studies begun to uncover the rich treasury of his thought. In the present book, the first of its kind in English, Keith Lemna contributes to this body of scholarship a comprehensive study of Bouyer’s cosmological vision. Commencing with his seminal monograph Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, Lemna explores in depth Bouyer’s sophiological and apocalyptic theology of creation, detailing especially his profound engagement with scientific, philosophical, religio-mythic, and poetic cosmologies. As the work of possibly the greatest twentieth-century Catholic “sophiologist,” the French theologian’s cosmology emerges as a path forward for a much-needed reintegration of human knowledge centered on the Mystery at the heart of God’s eternal Wisdom revealed in the economy of grace.

“Keith Lemna provides a synthesis of a brilliant thinker as well as a new path forward for Christian theology in the West, the East, and at the edge of contemporary scientific inquiry into the nature and meaning of the cosmos.”
 — PETER CASARELLA, University of Notre Dame

“Read Lemna’s pellucid work of love and learn how to read the wisdom of Christ in the pages of cosmic history.”
 — MATTHEW LEVERING, Mundelein Seminary

“Bouyer’s reputation in liturgy is here deservedly augmented by Lemna’s thorough and extraordinary study of the world as gift that reflects the triune life of God in loving praise.”
 — DAVID W. FAGERBERG, University of Notre Dame

“The Apocalypse of Wisdom is essential reading for both Bouyer scholars and contemplative seekers, who will find here an indispensable guide to a recovery of a ‘cosmicity’ that does full justice to the exigencies of faith, reason, and the mythopoetic imagination.”
 — ADRIAN J. WALKER, Catholic University of America

“Keith Lemna does a great service filling a lacuna in cultural memory by introducing us to this generous friend and fellow-pilgrim of so many Christian luminaries, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Jean-Luc Marion.”
 — CYRUS OLSEN, University of Scranton

“We can be grateful to Keith Lemna for making available to us Fr Bouyer’s comprehensive and coherent theological vision, one which is simultaneously intellectually and spiritually nourishing.”
 — MSGR MICHAEL HEINTZ, Mount St Mary’s Seminary

“The Apocalypse of Wisdom is a must-read for theologians, clergy, catechists, apologists, and everyone else whose vocation is to understand and convey the ineffable drama of creation and redemption.”
 — DAVID H. DELANEY, Mexican American Catholic College

“Here are keys to the thought of the French theologian who has reached out further and deeper than Teilhard de Chardin in the critical field of cosmology, at the crossroads of science, culture, and faith.”
 — JEAN DUCHESNE, literary executor to Louis Bouyer

KEITH LEMNA is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Benedictine-run Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Southern Indiana, where he has taught for nearly a decade.