“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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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