I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again. —Frodo Baggins I happened upon this quotation again yesterday evening, while I was reading my daughter The Lord of the Rings. It seems a dauntingly long tomeâŠ
The first of our ecclesiology posts is now up at the new Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy weblog. I wrote this one, and it’s essentially a sort of meditation on what it means to believe in the teachings of your own church and how that cannot help but affect one’s relations with other communions.
I have an announcement of a major new project, opening today: Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: The Weblog. It’s been plain to me for some time that Christian doctrine is starting to matter to more and more people, and a lot of the people it matters to are Orthodox Christians, some of whom are doing some very good writing about it. You’re of course aware ofâŠ
The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and to save the world from suicide. —T. S. Eliot, “Thoughts AfterâŠ
On Saturday, May 12, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Exploring Belief Systems Through the Lens of the Ancient Christian Faith turned one year old! It’s honestly a little hard to believe. This little path has now been winding about for more than three years. O&H was originally done as a series of lectures offered at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia, beginning in NovemberâŠ
There have been several postings online in the past few days of various articles claiming that the Christian Church at some period in history formerly sanctioned same-sex weddings and treated them just like marriages between a single man and a single woman, based mainly on the work of the late John Boswell. Someone even posted one of those articles in the comments section ofâŠ
Update: This post is now available as an audio recording at Ancient Faith Radio. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmedâŠ
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker. —J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” There is a new post today on MyOCN‘s “Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists series,” whose title caught my eye: Is it Orthodox to ReadâŠ
