Category: Culture
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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…
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The God Who Is Beautiful
I suggested this as reading in a comment yesterday and decided to re-post it so that it would be more readily available. It belongs with the question of God and beauty that I started in yesterday’s post. Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is…
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The Communion of a Book
I did not list the Scriptures on my list of “books of influence,” since it would seem somehow wrong to place it as a book among other books. Of course, it is a book, but it is unlike anything else we read. Over the body of the dead we chant the psalms so long as…
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With What Little We Know
I have written and posted at least three times that “I am an ignorant man,” which is to say that I do not consider myself a great source of wisdom and insight and that what knowledge I do have is indeed limited. It is also true that wisdom and insight are in short supply these…
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Seeking God
If I seem to avoid Church arguments on this blog site, there is a reason. For one, debates between Orthodox and Roman Catholics (or Orthodox and others) are interminable and unresolvable on the level of the internet. Most of us are arguing about things in abstract and are thus engaging in useless arguments. Secondly, it…
Couldn’t You save us without being crucified ? I could, but I would show my power. I want to show…