Marriage and Virginity According to St. John Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom was the greatest preacher of the ancient church, and few subjects occupied his pastoral attention more consistently than the sanctification of human sexuality, marriage, and family life. In this comprehensive study, Archpriest Josiah Trenham gathers the full breadth of Chrysostom's teaching on virginity, chastity, celibacy, marriage, contraception, parenting, divorce, remarriage, and widowhood, presenting the Golden Mouth's guidance on these subjects with the depth and systematic care they deserve. What emerges is a portrait of a pastor whose teaching on human sexuality was simultaneously exalted and compassionate: deeply formed by Scripture, thoroughly grounded in the ascetic tradition of the Church, and urgently relevant to the confusion of our own age. Chrysostom held consecrated virginity as the higher calling while affirming the genuine blessedness and sanctifying power of Christian marriage, and his account of both states is more searching and more beautiful than most contemporary Christians have ever encountered. With a foreword by His Grace Bishop Basil of Wichita and an afterword by Fr. Trenham himself, this volume makes available to English readers a treasury of patristic wisdom on the questions that touch most intimately on the Christian life, and demonstrates that the fourth-century bishop still speaks, as Bishop Basil observes, today even louder than in his own time.