Brecon Political and Theological Discussion Group

The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition

A talk by Peter Brooke

In the Three Horseshoes Inn, Orchard Street, Llanfaes, Brecon

on Thursday 18th June 2015 at 7.30 pm

‘The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition’ (English translation: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, Livadia, Greece, 1993) is the title of a book by Hierotheos Vlachos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos in Greece, a sequel to his ‘Orthodox Psychotherapy’ which attracted a great deal of attention in Greece when it was first published in the 1980s. Metropolitan Hierotheos argues that whereas the Western tradition tends to understand the economy of salvation judicially in terms of atonement for an offence committed against God, the Orthodox tradition understands it therapeutically as a process of healing. ‘The Church … is a spiritual hospital …’. This is the theme Peter hopes to develop with a very disparate group of people in the ‘Brecon Political and Theological Discussion Group’.

The text of Peter’s talk can now be read here.