“In Orthodox consciousness, sin is not simply a particular act, a concrete transgression that the Church has power to absolve when the sinner repents. Rather, I would say that sin is a kind of eternal sadness, the knowledge of the immense betrayal of God by man and, through man, by the whole creation. One cannot […]
Read More“Being deprived of meaning and suppressed as the ultimate event giving meaning to life, death in our culture has become a neurosis, an illness to be treated therapeutically. Whether obscured and masked by the funeral industry or naturalized by the apostles of everything natural, death remains omnipresent, but precisely as a neurosis. This anxiety supplies […]
Read MoreOur soul is a unique reality, yet possessing multiple powers. It uses as an instrument the body, which by nature co-exists with it. But as for that power of the soul we call mind, what instruments does that use in its operations? No one has ever supposed that the mind has its seat in the […]
Read More“The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins, is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God’s ways of thinking and feeling. It is a salvation […]
Read MoreGiven the excesses, fears, and ignorance found in popular religion, Plutarch has no trouble understanding why thoughtful people would rather be atheists. Indeed the gods themselves might prefer to have their existence denied than to be so maligned: “Why for my part, I should prefer that men should say about me that I have never […]
Read More“… we must be acutely conscious of the analogical interval within those words — such as ‘person’ — that we apply to both God and creatures, and always recall that the moral and ontological categories in which human personality is properly described are appropriate only to the finite and composite. The relationality of human persons, […]
Read More“… we must recognize that we cannot artificially separate the problem of the religious upbringing of our children from that of a renewal of the entire Orthodox community. We cannot teach what we do not practice ourselves. Our churches will have the schools which they deserve. And it is obvious that the rebirth of ‘liturgical […]
Read More“However one phrases it, the essential intuition of the great churches remains the same: that Christ is one divine person, who perfectly possesses everything proper to God and everything proper to humanity without robbing either of its integrity, and who therefore makes it possible for every human person to become a partaker of the divine […]
Read More“Whatever it is we think we mean by human ‘equality,’ we are able to presume the moral weight of such a notion only because far deeper down in the historical strata of our shared Western consciousness we retain the memory of an unanticipated moment of spiritual awakening, a delighted and astonished intellectual response to a […]
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RJB
April 8, 2021
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