Category: Culture
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Salvation by Grace and Just Showing Up
There has been a tendency in much teaching about the notion of salvation by grace to ground the image in a legal or forensic metaphor. Thus, we are saved by grace in the sense that someone else’s goodwill and kindness (God’s) has now freed us from the consequences of our actions. Thus we speak of…
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Giving Thanks Beyond Measure
I have frequently had reason to ask: who’s keeping whom? When I was received into the Orthodox faith, I and the rest of my family, stood one by one before the Gospel and a hand-cross to make a solemn promise: This true faith of the Orthodox Church, which I now voluntarily confess and truly hold,…
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How Can We Give Thanks?
Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation. Fr. Alexander Schmemann I do not believe it is possible to exhaust this topic and that there are many things worth saying in a second article. Most specifically I want to write on what seem to me necessary elements in giving thanks to God. If giving thanks…
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The Pity of God in Dostoevsky
The following passage is scandalous in the extent of its mercy. It is not in the canons – but in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Perhaps I love it because many of the men I knew in my early life were more likeMarmaladov (the old drunk) than like others. But this passage has always been a favorite. Forgive…
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A Personal Salvation
Perhaps the most difficult theological truth to communicate in the modern world is that of personal existence. Modern English has taken the word person from the realm of theology and changed it into the cheapest coin of the realm. Today it means that which is private, merely individual. As such, it becomes synonymous not with…
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A Few Things More
It’s very easy in longer postings (such as the previous) to forget the closest things. Church is everything the Scriptures say of it, but we largely encounter Christ in a particular setting, among particular friends and family (sometimes). Thus, just as He gives Himself to us in His consecrated Body and Blood, so too, He…
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For the Life of the World
The Orthodox Ministry, Come Receive the Life, has two podcast programs on the Sanctity of Life. The first is an interview with Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green, the second is an interview with Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, a relatively recent convert to Orthodoxy (I met him the week after his Chrismation), also on the…
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The Theological Task of Orthodoxy – A Further Word
Last October I ran the following quote from Fr. Georges Florovsky: Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology’ has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic…
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Riddled with the Worm of Bad Temper
We ought to be very careful to keep watch on ourselves. When a harbor is full of ships it is easy for them to run against each other, particularly if they are secretly riddled by the worm of bad temper. St. John Climacus, 4 I have seen my four living children nearly grown. The youngest…
Couldn’t You save us without being crucified ? I could, but I would show my power. I want to show…