Category: Aesthetics
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The Poetry of God
Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. – St. Pophyrios of Kavsokalyvia St. Porphyrios made this statement in the context of love and suffering: That’s what it is! You must suffer. You must love and suffer–suffer for the one you love. Love makes effort for the loved one. She runs all through…
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Providence – God in Extension
There are aspects of the Orthodox faith that require that we reach beyond what we think we know and dig more deeply into the writings of the Fathers. This is particularly the case when Orthodoxy uses similar language to Western theological models. We see a word (in this case, “providence,”) and think we know what…
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The Heart’s True Home
I remember the first time I saw the Robert Heinlein title, Stranger in a Strange Land. Very few phrases captured my inner sense of self in such a way. I was a teenager at the time – thus, a fair amount of my commonality with the title has to be chalked up to “teenage…
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Through a Glass Darkly
Perhaps the most intriguing passage in all of St. Paul’s writings is his description of an inner struggle in Romans 7. “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.For the good…
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The Whole Adam
Mt. Athos, in popular treatments, is often described as a “male enclave,” a place where no woman has set foot in a thousand years (this is not actually true). The exclusion of women from the Holy Mountain is deeply offensive to some (cf. European Union) and is imagined as a bastion of machismo in a…
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Healing the Soul and Unbelief
I have long been convinced that “believing” is grounded in something other than intellectual activity. I am simply unimpressed by most of the intellectual arguments that I see regarding both belief and unbelief. In both, I hear so much that is unspoken, and even much that is likely hidden from the speakers themselves. That being…
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A Difficult Beauty
It seems to me that bad things come easily. Whether it is ugliness, anger, or every kind of darkness, we not only see such things, but seem “bound” to see them. Why are we “hard-wired” for such observations? The answer is really quite simple: we are hard-wired to see things that are potentially dangerous, and…
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