The Feast of Friendship

Whether the author knows it or not, this is a profoundly humble book- in the sense of the Latin root of the word which indicates the soil from which something grows. The soil for this book is rich: the insights of Aristotle, biblical paradigms of friendship (David and Jonathan, Christ and the Beloved Disciple, Christ and Mary, Martha, and Lazarus), the reflections of the Church Fathers and exemplars of contemporary moral and theological reflection such as David Ford (whose concluding chapter in Self and Salvation informs the title of Fr. Paul's work), Pavel Florensky, John Zizioulas, John MacMurray, C.S. Lewis, Gilbert Meilaender, Paul Wadell, Andrew Sullivan, Carolinne White, and others. We'll extend the analogy: like soil that synthesizes its elements and transforms them into something that still contains them yet is unique, so this book is synthetic, carefully restating the essential contributions of each source while advancing them in intellectually acute and stimulating ways that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. For Fr. Paul, an Orthodox priest, friendship is deeply revelatory of the relations of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, and thus precious, of inherent worth. The pastoral reflections on the pitfalls and potentials of such a crucial aspect of our lives are among the most valuable aspects of this study. We offer it to you in hope that it will remind you, as it did us, that this overlooked dimension of our experience is a crucible of moral development, infused with the possibility of being a foretaste of the Kingdom.