The New American Religion

The following is from Pierre Lemieux's Introduction to The Idea of America, a collection historical essays collected by Lemieux and William Bonner, published by Laissez Faire Books: During the twentieth century, the authoritarian strand in American religion abated. The battles won by the Larry Flints during the second half of the century suggested that Puritanism …

Finding Jesus Christ in Genesis 2

Listening to a podcast by Fr. Thomas Hopko, Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir's Seminary, I came across the following glorious tidbits that are examples of how the early church fathers read the Old Testament from the perspective of the New Testament and found many links. (This is generally called "typology" by the way.) Adam was …

Recollecting Orwell

Walter A. McDougall, a Univ of Pennsylvania professor and Chair of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's "Center for the Study of America and the West" (and surprisingly, with titles like that, a political conservative) posted an article over at FPR this morning which included the following: One of my Lenten disciplines this year was to …

A Commemoration of the Missionary Nursemaid

Today, July 17, the Orthodox Church remembers Marina (or Margaret) of Antioch, Pisidia. Her father was a pagan priest and her mother died during her infancy, so she was raised by a nursemaid who happened to be a Christian. The story is the nursemaid raised Marina in the Christian faith and when her father found …

Could This Be a bit of One-upmanship?

A random thought that came to me while reading Colin Gunton's essay, Enlightenment and Alienation: One of the features of the Enlightenment, as far back as Roger Bacon, to Kant (the culmination of the Enlightenment proper) and beyond is the premise that rational thought, or as we typically think of it today, scientific thought, can …

Passions Revisited

I am just starting to reread Colin Gunton's little essay entitled, Enlightenment and Alienation (Eerdmans. 1985). He uses the word "passion" in a most remarkable way that I completely missed without my Eastern Orthodox sensibilities. He's offering a brief history of the western understanding of perception from Plato, to Descartes, to Kant and beyond. His …

Just Like Mississippi … Without the “Benefits”

I'm sitting outside reading this morning. A big, rainy system has just passed through (complete with a hard breakfast rain and occasional thunder). But that is all past and everything is April/May green (it's been a rainy July!) and the humidity is heavy enough to reveal itself as a light fog. It is both very …

A Major Revision of Some Previous Work

I was recently in correspondence with a new reader who had run across my studies on the parables. In order to carry on an intelligent conversation, it seemed a good thing to reread that set of essays and I was disappointed in what I read. What I had initially discovered in the parables was a …

The End of Marriage in New York

James Matthew Wilson has been waxing eloquent on the meaning of marriage and sexual mores for quite some time, but I found his latest article to be exeptional. Here's a brief quote (actually referring to an article written by Robert George). The legislation [in New York legalizing gay marriage] effectively ends marriage as a reality …