Category: The Journey of Faith

  • What We Really Want

    One of the great misunderstandings of our modern world centers around the place of the “will” in our lives. Modern democracies are built around slogans of freedom and fancy themselves to be the vanguard of advancing that cause. It has been a powerful force. Coupled with various aspects of free-market capitalism and the technological revolutions…

  • Utopia, Progress, and the Kingdom of God

    Near the dawn of the modern period (1500’s), the Reformation set in motion a world of ideas. If the old world of Medieval Catholicism was to be discarded (reformed), what should take its place? The earliest answers were largely those allowed and dictated by the various political states of Europe: Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, etc. On…

  • Frodo’s Last Lesson

    Frodo failed. If you’re a reader of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (or just a movie-goer), then you know that the central, heroic character, the young Mr. Frodo, ring-bearer, fails to throw the Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom at the end of his arduous journey. Everything he loved, his home, his friends, every…

  • The Gift of Hospitality

    This delightful gem from the Desert Fathers comes from Benedicta Ward’s The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers (157) There was a saint in Egypt who dwelt in a desert place. Far away from him there was a Manichean who was a priest (at least what they call a priest). Once, when this man was going…

  • The Gospel of Progress – and the New Jerusalem

    American fans of Monty Python will be familiar with the opening lines of William Blake’s poem, “Jerusalem” (and I apologize to my British readers for such an introduction). The poem was set to music in 1916 and became deeply popular in post-war Britain. The Labour Party adopted it as a theme for the election of…

  • Healing the Tragic Soul of the Modern West

    Fr. Georges Florovsky did far more than forge a path back to the fathers for the Orthodox Church: he also mapped a route for the return of Western Christianity to its own Orthodox roots. Discussing the modern encounter of Orthodoxy with the churches of the West, he wrote: A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious…

  • A Crisis of Virtue – The Good That We Need

    C.S. Lewis once said that courage is the “form of every virtue at its testing point.” It is easy to forget that figures such as Lewis, Tolkien, and even Chesterton, did not write during a time of Christian ascendancy. Lewis was denied a chair (a full professorship) at Oxford for years precisely because of his…

  • The Struggle Against The Normal Life

      Within the Christianity of our time, the great spiritual conflict, unknown to almost all, is between a naturalistic/secular world of modernity and the sacramental world of classical Christianity. The first presumes that a literal take on the world is the most accurate. It tends to assume a closed system of cause and effect, ultimately…

  • The Kingdom Within

    In December of 1849, the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, stood waiting his turn for execution, having been found guilty of plotting against the Russian Tsar. At the last minute, under instructions from the Tsar, the sentence was commuted from death, to four years in a Siberian prison. Later that day, Dostoevsky wrote a famous letter…

  • A Progressive Marriage

    How is your marriage progressing? This simple question is a way of focusing our attention on right-thinking about progress and the Christian life. I posed the question to myself – I have been married now for 43 years. My first thought was, “What would ‘progress’ in a marriage mean?” Do I love my wife more,…


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Latest Comments

  1. To all: We begin Lent im the Orthodox Church with a marvelous service called Forgiveness Vespers. At the end each…

  2. Matthew, Yes, the Orthodox do have a different calendar for Easter or Pascha. The feast and fast seasons and practices…

  3. Hello again Dee. Thanks so much for the invitation. I have been eating no sweets with the exception of honey…


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