Category: Cross
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The Collapse into Chaos – Where Only God Makes Sense
Nothing is more traumatic than the onset of chaos. Predictability breaks down, goodness seems to disappear, and the madness of sheer survival takes over. In chaos, everything seems plausible since reason itself has become unreachable. A recent spate of reading took me down the rabbit hole into the madness of the 14th century. For all…
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The Cross of Christ and God’s Love
God is love; and the Holy Cross is nothing other than God’s love. Love has the character of the cross. The power, fire, and nature of love consist in the fact that love has the character of the cross; and there is no love that does not have the character of the cross. The cross…
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The Despised God
In On the Orthodox Faith, St. John of Damascus declares: ‘The Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit the image of the Son’. Such statements are easily read and passed over as among the more obvious Trinitarian statements. I add to this statement another from St. Irenaeus: “That which is invisible of…
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The Despised God
In On the Orthodox Faith, St. John of Damascus declares: ‘The Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit the image of the Son’. Such statements are easily read and passed over as among the more obvious Trinitarian statements. I add to this statement another from St. Irenaeus: “That which is invisible of…
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The Last Temptation
I have pondered, from time to time, the oddity of Christ’s “last” temptation. The first temptation was that of turning stones into bread, the second, that of throwing Himself down from the Temple. The third and last temptation, however, was to be given “all the kingdoms of this world.” I understand hunger. Fasting for 40…
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A Cruciform Providence
The entire mystery of the economy of our salvation consists in the self-emptying and abasement of the Son of God – St. Cyril of Alexandria Trust in the providence of God is much more than a general theory of how things are arranged in our lives and in the world. We tend to discuss the…
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The Light of Christ and the Transfiguration
My attention was drawn to the event of the Transfiguration during my college years. It was then that I first read a book on St. Seraphim of Sarov, who himself was transfigured in a famous incident in his conversation with Motivilov. There, on a snowy winter’s day, the saint shown with a brilliant light, and…
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Tolkien’s Long Defeat and the Path of History
“Actually I am a Christian,” Tolkien wrote of himself, “and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Letters 255). +++ History as a long defeat –…
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The Best Place – The Worst Place – Orthodoxy in Location
From time to time, I read articles on the “10 Worst Cities in America,” or the State. There are similar articles on the “best.” The thoughts offered remind me of the article published earlier this year in which the Orthodox (worldwide) were described as the “least happy” people of any religious group. If you scratch…
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Hopko on the Cross of Christ
An excerpt from a commencement address at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2007, given by Fr. Thomas Hopko. It is deeply worthy of conversation. I first posted this back in June, 2007, when it was “new.” That which is true is always new and timeless. …I can tell you that being loved by God, and loving…
As a total aside: Henry Adams practically invented Social History with his efforts almost 200 years ago. A magnificent book…