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,…
Sexual love is the strongest experience of satisfaction; in fact, it is the prototype of all happiness. Thus, we humans should make genital erotism the central point of our lives. The degree to which you approve or disapprove of this statement determines, in large part, your relationship to the modern ethos of Western culture. The…
Boredom is one of those self-defining words. For me, the experience of ‘bore-dom’ feels like something boring a hole through my soul, like a hand drill boring a hole through wood. Boredom is a suffering, yet a suffering caused not by something happening, but by nothing happening. (Just as I am editing this article to…
For me the role of philosophy in Christian faith has always been something like Anselm’s famous motto: “faith seeking understanding.” When applied to the faith, Philosophy is just faith seeking understanding, useful for synthesizing with reason those things initially accepted by faith. Philosophy offers the chance to know those things which the faith preaches. Didn’t…
If it was required to jog a mile every time one bemoaned 2020 as being the worst year ever, America would be the healthiest country in the world. If they had to eat a chalk of broccoli every time they imagined that 2021 would save them, oh my God, we would hardly need a healthcare…
Why have the Jews suffered so much persecution throughout history? This is a typical question that comes up after one realizes just how constant the persecution of Jew has been, and history offers no shortage of scholars to answer it. Admittedly I am no such scholar. At best I am a cursory observer of the…
Existential isolation! A phrase virtually nobody speaks of these days, yet is the human phenomenon to blame for much of what is both great and destructive in the human experience. Without the means to gain a healthy acquaintance with one’s isolation there is no limit to the neurotic reactions it can provoke in a person,…
It used to really bug me when people would use the phrase, “your truth.” It always seemed to me a convenient evasion from the hard work of sober thinking, of confronting difficult truths about life and self, a denial of Truth itself. What I discovered is that many people indeed use it for these purposes,…
You certainly don’t need religion to have a sense of guilt. You don’t even need religion to be totally overcome by guilt. All you need is a sense of an ideal self—some version of a hero-project going on in your head—and you are a lifelong candidate for guilt. The atheist is always tempted to believe…
“No one can be wholly and indivisibly in the present,” writes Kierkegaard, “before he is finished with the future.” With this single line Kierkegaard exposes profound implications of both faith and how to conquer anxiety. In Kierkegaard’s most spiritual works, the “Upbuilding Discourses”, he battles with the question, “How do I know I have faith…
“Cognito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), set the tone for Western thought for the last 400 years. When Descartes first penned these words in 1637 he meant to establish a sure ground on which to develop a method for finding truth. What could be more beyond doubt than the phenomenon of one’s own…
“The problem with the black American psyche,” my roommate in college informed me, “is that we don’t know where we came from.” He explained to me that when Africans were pulled from their homes throughout West Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, they did not bring with them any trace of their ethnic-communal-regional roots. Once…
If you were a Puritan living in the Massachusetts Bay colony of the 17th century and were found committing adultery, your punishment would be to wear a large, red letter “A” on your chest. This allowed everyone in town to know what kind of sinner you were and how to shame you accordingly. It meant…
I was surprised when I first heard that our local Antiochian Orthodox Church decided to close all services for the remainder of Lent. I was even more surprised to learn moments later that all Antiochian Orthodox Churches in the United States were to be closed by order of our archbishop. Soon after that I was…
Living the Christian faith is based on a practice of solitude, a spirit of stillness, a pedagogy of experience, and victory through suffering. For some Christians these ideas are at best outdated, and at worst nonsense. The popular vibe given off by many today is that Christianity is something like an ongoing victory lap of…
There seems to be a growing interest in ancient philosophy for many today. I can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with the increasing levels of anxiety we face, anxiety seemingly impervious to modern remedies. One of the rising stars in this revival is Stoicism. Let me say at the beginning…
After church a few Sundays ago I found myself once again roaming around our little church library. I go up there from time to time to see what’s new. There’s never anything new. We’ve had the same books for years; I just like being in the presence of books, so alas, I roam. My typical…
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Kierkegaard
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