Category: Culture
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Crises, Dostoevsky and the Gospel
There is something of a common thread that runs throughout the novels of Dostoevsky, the 19th century Russian writer: personal crises. Dostoevsky has long been recognized as a genius of psychological perception, writing at a time before psychology was a formal academic discipline. Many of his novels carry a relgious theme, particularly Crime and Punishment…
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Can This Really Be the End? – Musing about the Eschaton
This is one of the earliest articles I wrote. In view of our current crises (plural) it seemed worth reprinting. O, Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again. Bob Dylan Ok. I’ll confess it right up front – I’m a Dylan fan. It shows…
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Away From Home
From a modern American perspective – one of the interesting components of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is to find yourself largely outside of the news cycle. There has been no television or radio. I have looked briefly at the internet, but mostly to answer email or tend the blog site. I am not…
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Jerusalem and the Modern Heart
Jerusalem, more than any city of the Holy Land, is a place of layers. This is generally true of most places here. Long before Jerusalem was the City of David, it was the city of the Jebusites, the city where Melchizedec, King and Priest, ruled and prayed – he who offered bread and wine and…
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In the Great Sweep of History
“The Great Sweep of History” is an event that occurs in the rear-view mirror, easily characterized in various fashions as we choose to label certain events as important and certain event as without significance. I believe that for the Christian there is no great sweep of history and that the temptation to view history in…
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Prayers By the Lake XCV – Children and Saints
XCV Children and saints cling to You, O Lord, the rest rebel against You. Children and saints are the boundary between the Kingdom of existence and the shadow of nonexistence.1 Guardians call themselves parents and cast Your children off crags into chasms. Guardians presume that they are parents, and so they…
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Truth and Existence
Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of Orthodox theology to contemporary thought is the correlation between truth and existence. I am not well-enough versed in writings outside of Orthodoxy to know whether this correlation is made by others as well – I have to drink the water from my own cistern. This understanding has been…
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On The Day of Solzhenitsyn’s Arrest
Excerpted from an essay Solzhenitsyn released the day he was arrested. The next day, Feb. 12, 1974, he was exiled to the West. The essay can be found on pp. 556 to 560 of The Solzhenitsyn Reader. +++ I reprint these words here, for a similar version (from his essays in From Under the Rubble)…
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Solzhenitsyn – The Harvard Address
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, addressing an assembly at Harvard University in June of 1978, offered profound insights on the West and the future of our society. His thoughts were anchored in a vision of man that was profoundly Christian, transcending the limits established in present societies. He issued a call for a deeper pursuit that can only…
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Solzhenitsyn Has Died – Memory Eternal!
One of the most spiritually significant events in my life was first reading Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. It was not his fiction that first fell into my hands, but a collection of essays, From Under the Rubble. He was, at the time, in the international spotlight as he struggled to maintain his witness to the Truth while…
P.Stephen, reading your response to Janine, my heart rejoiced, because that is exactly it ! Living near a monastery, I…