Krikščionis Pasaulyje

Antanas Maceina (1908–1987) was the foremost Lithuanian Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, whose work engaged Christian existentialism, personalism, and political theology at a European scholarly level. Writing from exile in West Germany while Lithuania was under Soviet occupation, Maceina produced works that kept Lithuanian Catholic philosophical thought alive and internationally engaged. Krikščionis Pasaulyje, shaped in part by Second Vatican Council ecclesiology, addresses the vocation of the lay Christian in the world — a question of immediate existential relevance to a diaspora community whose members were precisely such laypeople attempting to sustain their faith and identity far from their homeland.

As the tenth volume of the Krikščionis Gyvenime series and sponsored by the Toronto Lithuanian parish on its 25th anniversary, this book embodies the institutional and spiritual infrastructure that Lithuanian diaspora communities built to sustain themselves culturally and religiously. The book's editorial board — spanning Thompson CT, Boston MA, Chicago IL, Delhi Ontario, Putnam CT, Muenster Germany, and Brockton MA — maps the geographic dispersal of Lithuanian Catholic intellectual leadership in exile. For heritage schools, Lithuanian studies programs, and theological libraries, this volume is both a primary source of diaspora intellectual history and a substantive work of Christian philosophy in the Lithuanian language.

Diaspora intellectual publishing: Lithuanian Catholic press (Krikščionis Gyvenime series) maintained theological and philosophical discourse in Lithuanian exile communities by producing high-quality scholarly monographs in the Lithuanian language, connecting parishes across North America and Germany.