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Living a One Storey Life
Read more: Living a One Storey LifeI have chosen to use language of the “first and second storey” to describe the kind of bifurcation that the modern world has experienced over the past several centuries. Its results have been to smash the religious world into “sacred” and “secular” and to make believing both harder and disbelief more natural. Thus, to many […]
atheism, Conversion, Culture, Knowledge of God, Orthodox Christianity, The Journey of Faith, Union with God
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The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Read more: The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe – Gerard Manley HopkinsGerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest (a convert from Anglicanism) and perhaps the greatest modern (?) poet of the English Language (ok, he’s my favorite). My second daughter, Khouria Kathryn, made me aware of this poem. Hopkins is wonderfully sacramental in his poetry – God permeates his words and the world his words come […]
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Speaking of Christianity – Part 4 of the Meaning of Words
Read more: Speaking of Christianity – Part 4 of the Meaning of WordsSome years back, the Evangelical-convert-to-Rome, Thomas Howard, wrote a book, Splendor in the Ordinary. In it he argued for a sacramental world view and spoke of how that might effect the local home. I recall the book because it came out while I was in seminary and caused a minor stir. Some of us were […]
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The Meaning of Language – Part 3
Read more: The Meaning of Language – Part 3Having pointed out that much of popular Christian language (and some images in sacred texts) lend themselves to the notion of a “two-storey” universe – and having noted that the second storey as the dwelling place of all things spiritual has almost insurmountable problems – how should we speak about such things? First, it seems […]
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The Dormition of the Mother of God
Read more: The Dormition of the Mother of GodIn giving birth you preserved your virginity, In falling asleep you did not forsake the world, O Theotokos. You were translated to life, O Mother of Life, And by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death. Troparion of the Feast – Tone 1 It is easy to be put off by Orthodox devotion to […]
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The Meaning of Words – Part 2
Read more: The Meaning of Words – Part 2I have taken this discussion of life in a “one-storey” universe to that of language, precisely because I think that much of our language (as we presently define it) presumes “two-storey” meanings. One of the places I will press language is our speaking of God’s Providence. In the “Morning Prayer of the Last Elders of […]
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Worth Taking Time to Read
Read more: Worth Taking Time to ReadI confess I do not read near as much as I once did. Writing takes time – and is a way of slowly digesting a lot of years of reading – and, I hope, to some benefit. Today, however, I came across an article of Frederica Mathewes-Green, written last June, that was deeply moving. I […]
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What Do Words Mean in a One-Storey Universe?
Read more: What Do Words Mean in a One-Storey Universe?It seems to me that much of our religious vocabulary, defined many times within the past 500 years, is enculturated to speak a two-storey world (see the previous post for an explanation of two-storey world). Words such as “faith,” “believe,” and their relatives belong somehow to a portion of the world that is not first-storey. […]
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Death in a Two-Storey Universe
Read more: Death in a Two-Storey UniverseI have written before about the two-storey universe that is part of our cultural inheritance in the modern world. I have noted that the default position of our culture is secular protestantism. I have explained that I mean not that we do not believe in God, but that in our dominant cultural metaphor the God […]
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More on the Mystery of Salvation
Read more: More on the Mystery of SalvationI am almost always caught off guard by the number of readers an article on very simple (from an Orthodox point of view) matter of our salvation seems to generate. I forget that the treasury of doctrine that we live in is not part of the daily treasure that others know. I find tremendous comfort, […]
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Father, The instruction I also received corresponds to what you have said to Simon. Our nature is not “fallen nature”.…
Simon: Additionally, unless Fr. Stephen corrects me, “whatever” we do inherit from Adam’s fall , we derive through our fathers’…
Love this article! Thank you! We too can look at God and say to Him personally you are mine My…
Janine, I have not read that book. We are familiar acquaintances. We tend to have different backgrounds, different questions. I…
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“As time has passed, I think less about the lofty things of the faith, and more about the mess inside…