I know that a couple of you have purchased and read this massive work. My question: Is that a book I should seriously consider purchasing? It’s so damn expensive. The scholarship would have to be top-tier to justify this price. What say thee?
Aside from one serious gaffe involving a persistent slapdash attempt at repairing her overlook of Jude’s usage of {aidios}, I think it’s worth the cost for anyone wanting in-depth analysis of the case for patristic universalism. Extensive quotations from primary sources, often in Greek or Latin (or the occasional Coptic or Syriac dialect), but all the most important citations are translated into English.
Thanks! I have a lot of pennies to save.
akimel made an excellent blog post on the book with some very interesting comments below: afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/the-universalist-hope-in-the-early-church/#comments
Crap, I can’t add to the comments due to my old OS/browser…
Thanks to Fr. Kimel for doing a bit of a pre-review, though! (And to Caleb for noting it.)
Has a review of this book been done on here? I’m thinking that it sounds too scholarly for me though. 
I was writing up a summary at one point – it isn’t that the book is too scholarly, but that it’s freaking expensive as hell (so to speak ) – but got distracted on other things.
You are a busy man, that’s for sure. I’ve just gone to Amazon to order Thomas Talbott’s book ‘The Inescapable Love of God’ but it seems to be very expensive too??? It’s coming up as £134 for new or £110 secondhand??? Why is it so expensive?? Can you recommend cheaper books that are similar to Dr Ramelli’s and Thomas Talbott’s? 
Talbott’s book has been out of print, so that’s the reason for the high price right now. The 2nd edition is due to be released this year, so I’d wait for that.
Sonia
Hi Sonia,
Ah, that explains the price. I’ll wait for the second edition. I’ll check out the link to get a head start. Thanks again.
Much to my great shame (and astonishment), I have suddenly realized it has been about a year since I got the book, and I have been horribly lax about trying to properly summarize it. 
(I honestly thought I had only gotten it back this spring; though even six months is horribly lax…)
I don’t know when I’ll get around to doing it, either; this is mainly to remind myself that I have been terribly negligent. My sole defense, aside from being busy on other work, is that the book is dense as hell (so to speak) – which is a good thing for detail, but bad for trying to summarize it. (My relatively brief notes on her report about Maximus the Confessor are still nightmarish to sift through even in summary, and can be found around here somewhere… Oh, here it is: Michael McClymond vs Dr. Ramelli on patristics)
I’ll speak out of complete ignorance here, but why is the book so expensive? It cannot be due to greed, because she would actually sell far more copies @ $99, as opposed to $249 and would offset the lower profit margin per unit. Heck, even at $49.99 it would sell far, far more than it has. But, I am not a ‘scholar’ so maybe there is… shall we say… a price to admittance to said club?
If you can’t afford Ramelli’s book then you can’t afford to get into heaven. I guess that’s the logic.
It’s a limited print of a hardback book with lots and lots of pages, intended mainly for academic libraries as a research resource.
The selling cost is still artificially inflated so that the publisher can sell it to distributors at a huge discount, and they can sell it to wholesalers at a discount, and then to libraries or to scholars (though more likely it would never be sold wholesale, only by distributors to retailers or to supply chains e.g. library systems with distributor connections). But my novel would cost 10 times as much to buy if I had only printed and bound 500 copies: not an exact parallel (partly because her tome prints a lot more ink in small point font on twice as many pages), but close enough for illustration.
Thanks for explaining that Jason.
At Amazon, you can read a lot of her pages from her book indicated below. This will give you a flavour of her works:
Better yet, you can get a free pdf of the whole book here:
redalyc.org/pdf/591/59120913002.pdf
Or best of all!
A quote from Fr. Kimel’s review:
‘She lists the following: “Bardaisan, Clement, Origen, Didymus, St. Anthony, St. Pamphilius Martyr, Methodius, St Macrina, St. Gregory of Nyssa (and probably the two other Cappadocians !]), St Evagrius Ponticus [saint in Oriental Orthodox Churches?], Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. John of Jerusalem, Rufinus, St. Jerome [until his famous repudiation of Origen] and St. Augustine (at least initially), Cassian, St. Isaac of Nineveh, St. John of Dalyatha, Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite, probably St. Maximus the Confessor, up to John the Eriugena” (p. 11). St Ambrose of Milan also comes close with his belief in the salvation of the baptized.’
If anyone with the book can provide supporting quotes for these dudes, then I’d be happy to incorporate them into the list 
Also, if people could specify as to which Clement, Didymus etc it’s referring to then I’ll be happy to put bio placeholders in.