The Pastor by Gordon W Lathrop

The Pastor by Gordon W Lathrop

Renowned liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop has composed a rich, meditative, and explicitly ecumenical spirituality for working pastors whatever and wherever they are called: preachers, priests, elders, ministers, seminarians.

In Part One Lathrop urges pastors to become lifelong students of the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, and the Commandments, continually inhabiting the questions, reversals and paradoxes of Christian life.

In Part Two he elaborates on the pastor's chief activities presiding at the holy table, preaching, collecting for the poor "as the center and focus for pastoral identity and spirituality." Lathrop invites pastors to recenter their busy lives on God and fuel their ministry through prayer.

Gordon W. Lathrop has served as a parish pastor, as professor of liturgy at Wartburg Theological Seminary and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, and as visiting professor at Yale Divinity School, the Virginia Theological Seminary, the University of Iceland, the University of Uppsala in Sweden, and the Pontifical Thomas Aquinas University in Rome. His books from Fortress Press include The Pastor: A Spirituality (2006), Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (1999), and, with Timothy Wengert, Christian Assembly (2004). He has been president of both the North American Academy of Liturgy and the international Societas Liturgica.