Two Lectures Available Online

Two of my lectures from the recent Meeting the World series are now fully online, courtesy of Ancient Faith Radio: Meeting the World: Taking the Gospel Into Our Times and Our Places: Part 1, Part 2 A Peculiar People: Orthodox Christian Identity in a Hostile World: Part 1, Part 2 Three more will be available in the next several weeks, each broken into two…

Why I Love (True) Religion Because I Love Jesus

The above video by Jefferson Bethke has been making the rounds lately via various bits of social media. A few people have sent it to me to ask what I think. This touches on a lot of themes that I’ve written on before, and while it doesn’t particularly make any new theological claims—it’s really just a sort of standard, monergistic, anti-ecclesial, sentimentalist Evangelical Protestantism—for…

“We have to begin building our own institutions.”

October 9, 2011 In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. I have a friend who is a Ph.D. student at a university in New York City. He is a brilliant, traditional Orthodox Christian who is serious about his faith in Christ and also serious about doing real scholarly work. He is also possibly…

Updates and Notes

A number of updates and goings-on of variable interest: Book News: Conciliar Press tells me that Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy is selling very well. Thank you to all who have bought copies, recommended it to friends, or written reviews! I honestly had no idea when I did the original parish lectures in Charleston and then repeated them in Emmaus that they’d get so far away…

“Spiritual But Not Religious” and the Path to God

I sometimes encounter folks who tell me that they are “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). I wish I asked more often what exactly that is supposed to mean, though I am usually held back from asking by a strong suspicion that such a statement is not meant to undergo any sort of scrutiny. But what does it mean, anyway? This post is a reflection…

Choosing Orthodoxy

There is a critique in Orthodox convert circles, especially in what one reads on the Internet, of the “problem” of converting to Orthodox Christianity. Part of the problem, the argument goes, with American culture is its emphasis on conscious choice, that is, consumerism. We are bombarded nearly non-stop by our advertisement culture to make various selections which will be sure to enrich our lives…