Category: Aesthetics

  • The Disenchanted World

    A very apt word for the world we live in is: disenchanted. It was first used by Max Weber and a number of others to describe a certain aspect of the modern world – the absence of the sacred. Where people of earlier eras and other cultures have experienced the world around them as charged…

  • The Icon of Music

    This Sunday, the First Sunday of Great Lent, marks the return of the holy icons to the Churches in 843 A.D.  It is celebrated as the “Sunday of Orthodoxy.” This article offers a reflection on a different form of the icon – of equal importance – and equally worth protection and care. Orthodox theology is…

  • Singing the Lord’s Song

    I have been attending a conference and traveling this week and have not had time to write. I offer here a reprint of an article that is a personal favorite. It is frustrating for me that the article is so short – simply because I have a deep sense that the topic could be so…

  • What Happens When We Play (Pray)

    In my previous article I compared children’s use of play to the place of ritual words and actions in the life of the Church. I absolutely did not mean to imply that one thing is like the other. I mean to say clearly that they are very much the same thing. And I say this…

  • Singing the Lord’s Song

    In my first parish as an Anglican priest, I approached my first Midnight Mass with eager anticipation. I was trained “High Church,” with a very traditional liturgical emphasis – but I was serving in a “Low Church” parish. I was the first priest in their history to wear Eucharistic vestments as a normal practice. But…

  • Around the Corner

    Among the most appealing aspects of CS Lewis’ children’s fiction is at the point that I would describe as “turning the corner.” It is not that he creates a fantasy world, but that the fantasy world he creates somehow intersects with the world in which we live. It is the discovery that at this moment,…

  • Leaving Mary Out

    Decades ago, when I was in seminary (Anglican), a professor told me that he did not believe in angels. I was surprised and asked him why. He responded that he “did not think they were necessary…that anything angels did could be done by the Holy Spirit…” While this is obviously true, I noted that angels…

  • The Smashers Are Back – Lord Have Mercy

    The Smashers are back. The news is carrying photos of the wanton destruction being wrought in the Middle East by ISIS. Churches, Mosques, and human beings are being subjected to a new round of destruction at the hands of one of the most iconoclastic groups to have risen in the past century. One of their…

  • Face to Face – Beholding God

    My mind wandered back to these thoughts as I pondered the growing phenomenon of “selfies.” Even the President cannot resist making them. Of course, the “selfie” is the passion-driven distortion of the theology of the face – existence as ego. For the mystery of the face is not to look at myself, but to look…

  • Depth Perception

    One of the great blessings of the human brain can be found in its ability to take two things and make them one. We have two eyes, which means they necessarily see things differently. Look at the world with one eye open and switch to the other eye. Things appear to move. Viewing the world…


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  1. Mercy and Grace are the two doors into God’s Kingdom and modernity typically ignores or despises both. In their place…

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