Category: Modernity
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Orthodoxy and Religious Experience
How do we experience God? Do we hear voices? Do we sense a presence? Are there physical sensations involved? Should we see light or feel warmed? Some may be surprised to hear that our belief in God is not based in an interior human experience. Such things stretch across an incredible variety (such is the…
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Messiness in the Modern World
Salvation can be messy. I believe this with all my heart and so I state it at the outset of this article. As such, it marks me as a heretic in Modernity. I not only believe that salvation is messy – I believe that messiness is pretty much inherent to salvation. And along with that,…
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The Seeds of Love – Orthodoxy and the World
I saw a news story recently in which a student was asked for their thoughts on the recent campus turmoil. Her response, “History teaches us that only disruption brings about change.” No doubt, it is a common thought for many. The various mantras and slogans of revolution, as well as the myth of revolution itself…
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Dust of the Earth
“You are dust, and to dust you shall return…” (Gen. 3:18) Human beings have a fundamental bond with the planet on which we live – we are made of its stuff. We are not made of Mars dirt, or Moon dust, Jupiter gas, or Saturn rings. We are made of earth dust – we always…
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Passionately Drunk
The Philokalia, that wonderful collection of writings by the fathers on prayer of the heart, has as its full title, The Philokalia of the Neptic Saints gathered from our Holy Theophoric Fathers, through which, by means of the philosophy of ascetic practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined, and made perfect. Little wonder it is…
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The Incomprehensible God
In ’03 there was a small Indy film, Dopamine. The story involves a young computer programmer who is part of a small tech start-up in the Bay Area developing an artificially-lived computer character. The cartoon-like bird, can “hear,” “see,” and “interact,” with the user. The tech company manages to place its prototype in a children’s…
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The Madness of Democracy – A Spiritual Disease
Dostoevsky’s The Demons tells the story of a revolution within the context of a small village and a handful of personalities. The strange mix of philosophy and neurosis, crowd psychology and fashionable disdain for tradition all come together in the madness of a bloodbath. It is a 19th century Helter Skelter that presciently predicted the century to come. Our own…
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Overcome Evil by Doing Good
Drawing on the Book of Proverbs, St. Paul offers a simple admonition to his readers: “…if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” (Romans 12:20) He then adds: Do not be overcome by evil, but…
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The Useless God
The statement, “God is useless,” is, undoubtedly, sure to strike someone as an insult, not a statement of a faithful believing Christian (much less, a priest). That reaction tells me much about how we feel about the word, “useless,” rather than how we feel about God. In current American parlance, “useless,” is mostly a term…
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Moving Mountains
I live in a beautiful part of the country – the Tennessee Valley. On one side of the valley are the Smokey Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain. On the other side of the valley are the Cumberland Mountains, ancient relics of a once great sea. The Cumberlands, true to their geological origin, were great…
Esmée, I’m glad that the feature is working again. Thanks for sticking around!