This past week, I was at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania engaged in a work of culture creation. Benedict Sheehan, the director of the music program at the seminary, recently completed a new liturgy that a professional choir performed, then recorded. I was involved in both, to my great joy. But the time commitment for both was significant, and so I have no new post this week for my readers. However, I…

In last week’s post, I offered parts of Ilyin’s introduction to his never-before-translated work The Foundations of Christian Culture. In that introduction, he diagnosed the spiritual problems of modernity in a way frighteningly prescient for a man writing in 1937, before WWII, the Cold War, and the Sexual Revolution. He followed the introduction with a section where he discusses the problems that attend a specifically Christian culture: How is Christian culture even possible…

In about one month, I will be presenting a lecture on the creation of Christian culture at the Ancient Faith Writing and Podcasting Conference. Part of my presentation will be a brand new translation of Ivan Ilyin’s fascinating work on the subject of The Foundations of Christian Culture. It has not, as far as I know, ever been translated. But it deserves to be studied and considered by all culture creators, especially because of the…

After I published my manifesto A Call for A New Christian Culture, a rich discussion began in the comments. Most people provided suggestions or helpful criticism. A few seemed overwhelmed by the idea of culture creation. Some laughed at it outright. It’s not simply neo-Romantic mumbo-jumbo. I’m talking about rolling up your sleeves and working with people to recapture an experience of something they didn’t even know they were missing. To help…

It’s rare that a book grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go. It’s even more rare when that book is, essentially, a self-help book. But what if that self-help manual tells a profound truth about one’s culture and times in a way that no one else seems to be able to? Then it becomes a manifesto, a call to a new way of life. This is exactly what Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism is.…