Here’s my new book…
Available both in paper and as an e-book.
I’m Listed at Blog Flux
The tradition of the Church reveals to me my own poverty and need for God and my neighbor for, well, everything. The other sees the tradition of the Church as something that erases my poverty and makes me rich.
Continue Reading...Benjamin Schwarz in his review of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes that the author describes …the process of “assortative mating” and elite bunching that Murray previously elucidated, Currid-Halkett explains that “smart people want to be around other smart people…over time that results in highly stratified hyper-educated affluent places.” The practical social …
Continue Reading...Those who claim that their lives should be such as to console no one and to be a burden or the occasion of grief to no one, who derive no joy from others’ success and inflict no bitterness on others with their own perversity, I would call not human beings but beasts. They have only one goal: neither to love …
Continue Reading...Source: (WSJ) The Challenge of Jewish Repentance Meaning comes not from systems of thought but from stories, and the Jewish story is among the most unusual of all. It tells us that God sought to make us His partners in the work of creation, but we repeatedly disappointed Him. Yet He never gives up. He forgives us time and again. …
Continue Reading...Don’t expect to find much guidance on liberal education in the mission statements of leading American colleges and universities. They contain inflated language about diversity, inclusion and building a better world through social transformation. Missing are instructive pronouncements about what constitutes an educated person or on the virtues of mind and character that underlie reasoned inquiry, the advance of understanding, …
Continue Reading...I thought of you when I read this quote from “Spiritual Friendship (Cistercian Fathers)” by Aelred of Rievaulx, Marsha L. Dutton, Lawrence C. Braceland – What plot of land or what stream turns up only one stone of a single kind? Or what forest produces only one tree of a single species? Thus among non-sentient beings, a kind of love …
Continue Reading...Utopianism may be a species of optimism, but it is always born of discontent. Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. Underestimating, or worse ignoring, the American tendency toward Utopianism of one kind or another is one of the central reasons that Orthodox evangelism is frequently unsuccessful in the long-term. Americans aren’t spiritually discontent, we are often not …
Continue Reading...…you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job. These days, people talk about college as an investment because they think of education as a bank account: You deposit the knowledge and expertise you’ve earned, and when it comes time to get a job, you make a withdrawal, putting all that stuff …
Continue Reading...Thinking of all the divisions and disagreements we are currently experiencing in America puts me in mind of the prayer “Bless My Enemies O Lord,” written by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich a Serbian bishop who spoke out courageously against Nazism until he was arrested and taken to Dachau. Taking the bishop’s prayer to heart, I have to ask what lessons are …
Continue Reading...While theology, Church history, liturgy and the rest of what is taught in seminary is important, these are all secondary. What we teach in our seminaries isn’t an end in itself but at the service of helping future clergy and lay leaders in their vocation to help others follow Christ in the ordinary circumstances of their lives.
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