Category: The Journey of Faith
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The Choices We Make
Our culture celebrates the ability we have to choose – and so we think a lot about choices. We are told every four years that we get to “choose” our leaders (though the choices given to us might not be suitable in either direction). As I look back and think of my preaching over the…
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Reflections on Florovsky
The following is from my earlier post of Florovsky on Ecumenism: The entire western experience of temptation and fall must be creatively examined and transformed; all that “European melancholy” (as Dostoevsky termed it) and all those long centuries of creative history must be borne. Only such a compassionate co-experience provides a reliable path toward the…
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You Must Be Born From Above – John 3
Absolutely one of the strangest conversations to occur anywhere in the gospels takes place between Jesus and the inquiring Nicodemus in the third chapter of John. Of course, at least one of its verses (or at least its Stephanus Pagination verse number) has become nationally famous as an attendee at almost all televised American sporting…
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Mystagogical Catechesis and the Gospel of John
I promise to get “off topic” from time to time – but I would like to do a bit of a “series” here in the post Pascha period – doing what has been done in the history of the Church – and look at the Gospel of John and what it means for us as…
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Knowing God – After Pascha
We approach things so differently in our modern world (as opposed to the ancient world). All of us have access to a great deal of information, although the information that comes to us when we are in the passive mode is less than useless (here I mean television and popular media). Thus I would paraphrase…
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Conversion and the Return of our Humanity
My wife and I returned last night for Detroit, Michigan, having attended and been part of a Colloquium on the Orthodox Faith, aimed primarily at Episcopalians and Anglicans. We met a wonderful group of people and were struck by the quality of the conversation that took place. I thought I would share a thought or…
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I Can’t Make It Without God
I introduced some of Tito Colliander’s Way of the Ascetics. I offer here the second chapter as well. I have been in Detroit, Michigan attending a conference and will return to the website on Tuesday evening if I’m not able to do any work in Detroit. May God bless. Chapter Two: ON THE INSUFFICIENCY OF HUMAN…
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Getting Started
Tito Colliander wrote a small spiritual classic, The Way of the Ascetics. I heartily commend it to all. Asceticism is not simply the domain of monks, or something foreign to Christianity, much less is it opposed to salvation by grace. Asceticism is not an earning of grace, but a “doing of the Word.” It is…
There is a psychological method called Internal Family Systems, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. It addresses the various internal “parts…