Alexander Schmemann

Let me introduce a site dedicated to one of my favorite authors: http://www.schmemann.org. Schmemann was a represantative of the Russian Orthodox varian of liturgical renewal movement, with an unusually fresh feeling of the worship, through his books making usual words sound unusual.

He was a main who said: " "Orthodoxy is the right Church full of the wrong people!"

Here are excerpts Peter Scorer's article:

Schmemann was born in Revel, Estonia, into a Russian emigre family in 1921. When he was seven years old the family moved to Paris. For many years he wrote and broadcast weekly sermons on Radio Liberty to the Soviet Union. In Paris he attended first the Russian Cadet school, and later transferred to the Lycee. He attended church at the St Alexander Nevsky cathedral on the rue Daru, and served in the sanctuary under Metropolitan Evlogii. ...

Already by the age of fifteen he had heard Fr Sergius Bulgakov preach and lecture, and with the beginning of the war entered St Sergius Theological Academy, where he was to stay for the next twelve years, first as a student and later as a lecturer. ... Later, already in the United States, Schmemann was to complete and publish (1954) his Historical Path of Eastern Orthodoxy, which he had started in Paris. ...

In addition to his Orthodox teachers, Fr Alexander was also indebted to the entire spiritual and liturgical revival that was so widespread in the West at the time and to the leading exponents of the �liturgical movement� such as Odo Casel, Lambert Beauduin, Jungmann, Bouyer, Guardini and others. ...

In 1945 he married Juliana Ossorguine, at that time a student at the Sorbonne, who was to bear him three children. The following year he was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Vladimir Tikhonitskii, the head of the Russian Exarchate in Western Europe under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

... Various factors combined to bring about his decision to leave France for the United States. A certain frustration with the confused situation of the Church in Europe, the hopes of realising a more consistent vision of the Church, the need for theologians in America and his own need for a larger and freer arena in which to work may all have contributed. The decisive factor was the departure of another teacher, Fr George Florovsky to the United States in 1949, to become dean of St Vladimir�s Seminary in New York. Two years later, Fr Alexander moved there with his family to join him. This move marks the beginning of the second and most brilliant period of his life.

... above all he wrote about the matter dearest to his heart, liturgical theology, the meaning of worship, the sacramental life of the Church. Of Water and the Spirit, An Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Sacraments and Orthodoxy, Great Lent and his final work, due to be published soon, on the Eucharist.

... His greatest achievement in this field came with the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America by the Patriarch of Moscow in 1970. This move was not without its critics, and to this day is not accepted by all. For Fr Alexander, the many years of negotiations, preparation, and the achievement of autocephaly were all steps in the creation of a truly united, single Orthodox Church in America".