“What about all the people who never heard of Jesus?” I said to my unexpecting Mormon grandmother, busy trying to teach me, her 7-year-old grandson, the family faith. As early as I can remember, I’ve been wonderstruck by existence and the diversity of life, thought, language, and culture throughout the world. When my grandmother attempted…
“The assailants of Christianity being as noisy as its adherents were mute, the latter began to fear that they were singular in their opinions, and, dreading singularity more than error, they joined the crowd without sharing its creed.” Without immediately revealing the source of this quote, would you believe that it was written last Tuesday…
Why would any Christian want to use icons in worship? Isn’t it unwise to have an image in your mind during worship? Shouldn’t one completely rid oneself of mental conceptions for worship to have its perfect work? This mindset is certainly represented in many Protestant churches. In near-Islamic fashion, many of these church buildings are…
As a former Evangelical Christian, I understand the basic Protestant abhorrence of icons. As an Orthodox Christian convert, I can’t imagine Christianity without them. This change of perspective represents an extreme makeover. Evangelicals and Orthodox are on opposite ends of the Christian religious spectrum, yet both sides pride themselves on being the foremost representatives of…
At the time of this writing, Christmas is a mere 10 days away. One of my favorite things about the holiday is that Protestant Christians worldwide allow themselves to display their baby Jesus, Mary, angels, and saints in their homes and churches, falling back in with the tradition of the ancient Church in displaying icons…
Growing up in the United States and learning history in public school, I believed America was on a mission from God to save the planet. If you grew up in the States and are over the age of 40, you probably had the same impression. Stories of the early European settlers fleeing religious oppression, seeking…
Once again, since I can’t seem to write an article to save my life these days, I present to you, my reader (now watcher), another Failed Christian podcast episode featuring me and the host, Joey Papa. This episode speaks mostly to the historic Orthodox Christian treatment of hell. Enjoy, and please let me know your…
This is my first time publishing a podcast rather than a written blog. I don’t intend to make it a regular thing, but we’ll see. Clearly, I have struggled to write on this blog for a while (it’s been nearly 4 months), but I hope to emerge soon from various other projects and resume. In…
“Just eight centuries ago, we took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth…” (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov) The true homeland on this…
A new article from Christianity Today hit my news feed last week, and it blew me away. The title was: “Top 5 Heresies Among American Evangelicals”. The article is based on a recent survey which found (among other disasters) that 73% of American Evangelicals believe Jesus is a created being. Yes, a full three-quarters of…
Albert Camus, the famed author of philosophical absurdism, was certainly not the first to propose that life is absurd. The author of Ecclesiastes beat him to it by several centuries. “Vanity of vanities, everything under the sun is vanity,” goes the famous repeated line. I remember the shock I felt reading Ecclesiastes for the first…
Why are Americans agitated and depressed while living in great abundance? I don’t think the premise of this question needs qualifying, but for the sake of argument consider this piece from the Commonwealth Fund. It contains several disturbing statistical charts comparing American mental illness and substance abuse with several other high-income countries. America consistently tops…
Any fan of Carl Jung would be fascinated to hear his take on the current movements of transgenderism, gender fluid, genderqueer, non-binary, etc. But does he give one? Surely the godfather of psychological archetypes has something on the subject in his massive collected works. The answer is a disappointing “no,” and for obvious reasons: (a)…
Anyone who has tried to incorporate both faith and reason in their practical life has run into this temptation. It usually goes something like: God is my plan A, but if at some point he doesn’t act I’ll be forced to go with plan B. This is totally what Abraham did when raising the knife…
Xenophon says of Socrates that he “was not eager to make his companions orators and businessmen and inventors, but thought that they should first possess moderation. For he believed that without moderation those abilities only enabled a person to become more unjust and to work more evil.” This is why we speak of modern knowledge…
Study the literature long enough and you will discover something curious about most discussions of environmentalism—there is a strange lack of effort to define human nature. I believe this is why most attempts at solving our massive ecological problems are going nowhere fast. Without a shared paradigm concerning what a human is, the whole environmentalist…
Slowly making my way through Augustine’s “City of God” for the first time (to my great shame) has been a treasure trove of theological Aha! moments. The most recent of which came yesterday while reading through book XV where Augustine discusses why God accepted Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s. I remember this being a much-disputed…
I wonder how many of our problems today are linked to the loss of our sense of wonder. I had a client this morning who was lamenting his inability to be playful with his wife and kids. His is a common story of a work-from-home, self-employed parent and spouse who has a difficult time separating…
Could it be that first Biblical story is not the story of creation, nor of the fall, but that of Job? If the book of Job predates all other books in the Bible, as some contend*, it would mean that the great Judeo-Christian tradition begins with theodicy: why do the righteous suffer? It begins not…
It used to be that teachers prided themselves on presenting a subject to their students from a non-bias perspective, actively attempting to falsify their own beliefs on the subject, leaving it to the student to think through the subject and come to their own reasoned conclusions. This was my experience in my graduate studies in…
A major problem between the social justice movement and Christianity can be found in early Critical Theory. Max Horkheimer (head of the Frankfort School in the 1930’s and pioneering figure of Critical Theory) found in German idealism an “inherently bourgeois philosophy,” containing elements that posed serious threats to the progress of social justice. For Horkheimer,…
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Kierkegaard
Doctrine Matters
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