Lately, one of the dominant themes to surface during my parish’s post-Liturgy coffee hour is the complicated nature of conversion. Newcomers ask me and other “converts” (of course, we’re all converts! But you know what I mean…) why we became Orthodox, and many of us find it’s simply too difficult to explain our reasons. As one friend has pointed…
I asked Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick to stop by the Time Eternal blogathon and share something with us about St. Ignatius. Why? Because today (December 20) is St. Ignatius’ feast day–AND because Fr. Andrew’s most recent book is about him, and because I wanted to know what St. Ignatius had to say about the birth of Christ. Why…
The first time I guest posted on Time Eternal last October, I explored the problem of impatience and its connection to the Fall. I noted that impatience amounts to a disordered relationship to time—a belief that we should decide when to receive God’s gifts, rather than waiting for His appointed moment. As we approach the Lord’s Nativity I…
Today I’ve asked my friend, Dr. Miriam DeCock, to reflect on how time/temporality shapes her academic field of training. I first met Miriam when we both started teaching at the Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College in Toronto. She’s since moved on to new opportunities (and is about to head off to a postdoc in Denmark!), so…
Since December 1, I’ve been listening to the audio version of God is in the Manger, an Advent devotional comprised of excerpts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer letters and writings from prison. This is a book I often read through this time of year. Bonhoeffer isn’t Orthodox but his life and death under the Nazi regime are an important witness to Christianity in…
Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the falling asleep of Fr. Alexander Schmemann. I would like to follow up on this occasion with some poignant thoughts from one of his lesser-known works, The Liturgy of Death, a compilation of four talks Schmemann gave in 1979 at a summer institute at SVOTS. In these talks, Schmemann traced the historical…
How are we holding up, Time Eternalites? It’s kind of an interesting point in the Nativity Fast–the messy middle is slowly starting to give way to something else. The light at the end of the tunnel can be seen–for better, for worse. The “crunch time” of holiday deadlines is becoming real, but so too is the immanence of…
This morning I’m delighted to welcome Caroline Langston to the blog. Caroline and I met a year and a half ago at the 2017 Ancient Faith Conference for Writing and Podcasting and have continued to spur one another on in matters of writing and faith. Today Caroline is sharing a slice of her journey waiting for her youngest…
Happy Tuesday! Most Tuesdays of the year, I run a series on Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, Twitter and Instagram) called #TemporalTuesdays. It features a quote that somehow inspires awe an humility in the face of time or eternity, usually from a theological source but sometimes also from literature. I love these quotes not only because it…
Yesterday morning, the third Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity, a phrase I’ve heard on countless occasions rang in my ears as though for the first time: “… or rather…” It’s a tiny but profound phrase that occurs in a sentence sandwiched in the middle of the Eucharistic canon: In the night in which [Christ] was given…