Tag: Loneliness

The Metaverse and the Garden of Eden

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Recently the company formerly known as Facebook officially rebranded itself as “Meta,” declaring that its new “overarching goal” is “to help bring the metaverse to life.” What exactly is the metaverse? According to an increasing number of influential CEOs and other leaders in the tech world, it is a nascent globally connected virtual reality experience which, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, will eventually become “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content…

Preparing for Lent in a Time of Pandemic

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It has now been a year since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, changing almost overnight nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives in the modern world. Some of us have lost loved ones; the Church has bidden farewell to more than a few holy men and women whom the Lord chose this year to call home. The quarantine restrictions that have been in place more or less continuously throughout the world have also…

On Secular Churches and the Mystical Sacrifice

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A headline caught my eye several days ago: “They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a While, It Worked.” While the concept of a church without God is beyond doubt bizarre, it nevertheless also makes perfect sense. In our age of loneliness, amidst the near-total collapse of practically every traditional form of community and social structure, to abandon Christianity is to hurtle oneself into the void foretold by Nietzsche when…

Not Yours, But You: Almsgiving in the Modern Age

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In the Gospels there are many “hard sayings” of our Savior. Of these hard sayings, there are also many which have been all but forgotten — even by those who sincerely strive to be faithful Christians. Of these hard and forgotten sayings, I would like to call our attention today to one in particular: When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your…

The Age of Desire (Anthropology of Antichristianity, Part 6)

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When the Lord was taken down from the Cross, the Cross remained on Golgotha, and then it was thrown into the pit that was in that place, where this instrument of execution was usually thrown, together with other refuse. Soon Jerusalem was razed and all of its edifices were leveled to the ground. The pit containing the Cross of Christ was also filled over. When the pagans rebuilt the city (the Jews…

The Crucible of History (Anthropology of Antichristianity, Part 3)

· Hieromonk Gabriel
In the most recent article of my series on the anthropology of Antichristianity, I discussed loneliness as the defining characteristic of the modern age, stating that: “We have become existentially unmoored, and so it is no surprise at all that we feel lost, purposeless, and alone.” Faced with such a dilemma, as I see it modern man has only three real choices: Christianity, Antichristianity, or suicide (the latter of which comes in…

The Age of Loneliness (Anthropology of Antichristianity, Part 2)

· Hieromonk Gabriel
We live in strange times. Modern technology has nearly obliterated the constraints of distance, allowing us to become interconnected with one another to an extent unimaginable even a few short decades ago, and yet nevertheless at the same time we find ourselves living in an age of absolutely unprecedented loneliness. According to a recent article in Psychology Today: In the last 50 years, rates of loneliness have doubled in the United States. In a survey of over 20,000…