Category: Culture

How “Nous” Became a Trojan Horse For Secularism, and Why it is So Difficult to Translate

· Robin Phillips
Anyone who has been involved in Orthodoxy in America will likely have seen much discourse (often polemical in nature) about the “nous.” In fact, the nous plays a pivotal role in anti-western polemics since it has become a trope that “the West doesn’t have a concept of the nous.” Accordingly, the nous functions as a type of secret thing you can only…

Tom Holland’s Dominion: A Review

· Fr. Stephen De Young
Christianity emerges as a system of interacting with understanding the world, described in teachings and lived by the actual human persons of every era. This way of thinking and seeing has been bred into the bones of every person born in the West for centuries, though today it may go unnoticed like the air which we breathe.

Scripture: Myth or History?

· Fr. Stephen De Young
The scriptures call us, rather than attempting to reframe the scriptures and tradition of the church within the context of the things which we as modern people "now know," to reframe our own understanding of our lives, our personal histories, and the world as we encounter it in terms of the fullness of God's creation and the reality of Jesus Christ himself.

Ss. Paul and Constantine

· Fr. Stephen De Young
It is commonplace for many modern Christians, even Orthodox Christians, to consider St. Constantine a problematic figure.  Even the fact that he is considered a saint within the Orthodox Church is seen as difficult.  Obviously, the end of Christian persecution by the Roman Empire was a great benefit to the Church and to the Christians of the day.  But it is not…

Anatomy of a Foreword: Metr. Kallistos on Sexual Morality

· Fr. John Cox
In the past few days Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has generated more discussion of his thought than at any other time in recent memory. The venerable Metropolitan wrote the foreword to the newest edition of The Wheel, a journal ostensibly dedicated to questions of Orthodox theology and praxis. More specifically, this edition of The Wheel focused on human being and sexuality, particularly questions…

The Church and Homosexuality: A Meditation

· Hieromonk Herman (Majkrzak)
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. —Romans 8:18 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” At that saying…

David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: A Review

· Fr. Stephen De Young
That David Bentley Hart was asked to produce a translation of the New Testament may at first seem counter-intuitive.  His field is philosophy and philosophical theology, not New Testament or Greek language (though he reads Greek).  Further, with the wide range of New Testament translations available to a general audience in English, not to mention the variety of Greek critical editions available…

Two Surprising Statistics about Orthodox Christianity in America

· Seraphim Danckaert
Plenty has been written about the Pew Research Center’s second Religious Landscape Study, published in 2014. Relatively little commentary has focused on what the findings tell us about Orthodox Christians in America. In part, the lack of attention is due to the very small sample size of Orthodox believers in the study — so small that the margin for error is somewhere…