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…
Mutual understanding is the lifeblood of successful marriages. Take any successful relationship you know of and you can bet they succeed because they’ve learned the art of communicating. Without it even the best relationships shipwreck. But as every man who has ever tried to argue with a woman, and every woman who has ever tried…
Let me make a quick personal note on the word self-care. In truth, I really detest this word, and I think there is good reason why it took thousands of years for it to find its way into the vernacular. Not only does the word sound wimpy, it sounds selfish; it sounds like the sort…
Self-care should not be an attempt to overpower or conquer oneself, but rather the free experience of oneself. If conquering yourself—i.e., making yourself not angry, not sad, not nervous, etc.—is your primary aim, then chances are, however you go about the conquering, you will only succeeding in fortifying whatever neurosis you were struggling with in…
“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium… a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of…
Rarely a day goes by when my newsfeed isn’t running at least a half dozen articles on mental health. I’m a mental health counselor, and most of these articles bore me to tears; I can only imagine how others take them. The truth is, mental health articles are about as fun to read as they…
My wife recently put me on a mandatory book buying fast. Begrudgingly, I complied, but figured I’d make the most of it by rereading some old books that I haven’t touched in years. All in all, it’s been a highly productive fast (finally we have enough money left over to spend on senseless, impulsive purchases…
Lots of people have taken the labor to define Christian fundamentalism, so I will resist the urge to do so here. Instead, I will attempt to describe the fundamentalist personality in a way that will make it unmistakable for those who have personal experience with it. You’ve met him. He’s that guy who starts a…
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Kierkegaard
Doctrine Matters
Neither polemic nor compromise, but engagement
