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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Kierkegaard
Doctrine Matters
Neither polemic nor compromise, but engagement
Eric Hyde's Blog 