Christian colleges should stop living by marketing lies. I learned the ugliness at a very young age. The problem is not difference of perspective, but lies. If you are hanging out with faculty at a Christian college as a youngling and you hear them mocking the beliefs of the parents and boasting about how they exist to change those beliefs in the students, then you are witnessing a fraud, even if you disagree with the perspective offered. Colleges are not,... Read more
WandaVision is difficult to review, because almost anything one says is a spoiler. This is not so good as when one hears the summary and guesses what the show might be about, assuming one is not in seventh grade, one is likely to be right. This is not even Buffy second season for complexity and story arc so far. And yet the first three episodes were risky video, a slow unfolding of the central concept, and so there is hope.... Read more
There is, my adult children tell me, a small temptation that can ruin a life. This is the Temptation of the Sad Sack. When I was a boy, the Sad Sack was a comic (before they were high brow comix), World War II humor transported to the 1970’s, the jokes lost in transition. There have been many Sad Sacks in literature, the first I know of being Dolon in his weasel hat, the Sad Sack of Homer’s Iliad. He was a... Read more
The Orthodox Church is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. The Church is one, and no salvation is found outside the Church. The unity of the Orthodox, catholicity, is a completeness. Where the grace of God is present, the Church is present. This is normally based on the grace of God poured out to the individual member of the Church through the sacraments of the Church and other means of grace. This grace grants the Church, and individual members... Read more
This is the diet time of year, the lean month, sans alcohol, sans parties, sans jollity. Yet the hunger for Pascha (Easter!) coming and summer (the Glorious Fourth!) and Christmas (so distant, so certain) is there. The lack makes the love sweeter. Lacking pleasure, having the pain of not having, is necessary for great pleasure. Too much of what we love and the beloved becomes cheap or cloying. Enough is sufficient and so we wait. Pain and pleasure go together, neither evil, both potentially good.... Read more
On this feast I give you the message from Bishop Thomas: I greet you on the solemn and joyous feast of the Meeting of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ! While there is much spiritual fruit to be harvested from this feast of the Lord, I would request you pay attention to the words of the holy God receiver Saint Symeon. Upon receiving the Christ Child from the arms of the Most Holy Theotokos, Saint Symeon exclaims, “Lord, now... Read more
Look to beauty, all sorts. Once in Tsarskoye Selo I saw so much beauty at once that I was unable to process more. All I could do was pray. There is a limit to what we can handle even if the thing is good. The beauty in creation, constantly changing and growing, would kill us if we saw it all at once. Thank God we cannot. We see a bit, first when we open our eyes, then in our mothers, in... Read more
I learned something last week, but first I must tell you how, painfully, I learned this universal lesson. Vroom At last our motorcar, the faithful Israel, who came to us a lemon that by a divine warranty was made useful, gave out along with her coverage. She was not worth the cost of repairs and so Consumer Reports ratings in hand we went off into the Internet to buy a new-to-us used car. The final results were, we think, very good:... Read more
There is education in beauty. The beauty, and the heights, made me giddy as I neared the top of the Duomo . The view from outside, overlooking Florence, was food for the imagination, but for me the feast was inside, seeing the arches and the art, caused my highest fantasy to fail. I was too feeble to see, let alone capture such overwhelming, gigantic, beauty. Every time I read Dante, moving with him as a guide toward Paradise, I recollect the... Read more
God is love and has built a cosmos that is based on love. As a result, God allows us to consent to serve Him. One aspect of goodness in the cosmos, obvious to all of us, is beauty. Everywhere we look there is beauty. This is a sign not just His existence, but of His nature. There is also ugliness and evil, some of which we can explain by our misuse (my misuse!) of our ability to consent. Plato notwithstanding, we... Read more
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