Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević)

For the last eleven years the ruling bishop of the Western American Diocese is Maxim (Vasiljević,) well known in academic circles since he holds several academic titles and is professor of the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at the University of Belgrade. Maxim (secular name Milan Vasilje¬vić) was born on June 27, 1968 in Foča, Yugoslavia, into a family of a priest. His father Lazar is a priest and mother Radmila, nee Todorović.

After finishing elementary school in Sarajevo (1983), he studied Seminary school in Belgrade (finished in 1988), served the army, and enrolled into the Faculty of Orthodox Theology in the same city.

He was tonsured a monk in Tvrdos Monastery, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on August 18, 1996, by Bishop Atanasije of Herzegovia, who also ordained him a deacon (1996) and priest in 2001.

Bishop Maxim graduated from the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at the University of Belgrade in 1993. He completed his Masters of Theology at the University of Athens in 1996, and then three years later, in 1999, at the same University, he defended his doctorate in the field of Dogmatics and Patristics with the title, “Participation in God” in the Theological Anthropology of St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Maximus the Confessor.

The One and the Many

Studies of God, Man, the Church, and the World today

by Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas

This volume offers a collection of Zizioulas articles which have appeared mostly in English, and which present his trinianatarian doctrine of God, as well as his theological account of the Church as the place in which freedom and communion are actualized. The title, The One and the Many, suggests the idea of a profound relationship that exists between the Persons in the Holy Trinity, between Christ and the Church, between one Catholic Church and many catholic Churches. On each of these levels of communion, each one is called to receive from one another and indeed to receive one another. And while this is understandable at the Triadological and Christological levels, it raises all sorts of fundamental ecclesiological questions, since the highest point of unity in this context is both the mutual ecclesial-eucharistic recognition and agreement on doctrine and canonical-eccelesiological organization.