Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God. Freedom is never then the mere “negative liberty” […]
Read MoreSt Maximus the confessor, following Gregory of Nyssa (On the Creation of Man 16-18, PG 44:177ff.), comes to the very root of the problem of human existence when he regards the biological mode of procreation as a result of the Fall (Ambigua 41, 42, PG 81:1309A, … ). Those who attribute this view of Maximus […]
Read MoreAt one time, in very late antiquity, Western Christians could speak with firm if dour certitude of a place of real physical and mental agony to which the vast majority of the race would be consigned at the end of days and to which even babies would be sent forever and ever if they were […]
Read More“God is not, in any of the great theistic traditions, merely some rational agent, external to the order of the physical universe, who imposes some kind of design upon an otherwise inert and mindless material order. He is not some discrete being somewhere out there, floating in the great beyond, who fashions nature in accordance […]
Read More“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it’s because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don’t want to acknowledge. I’m speaking here not of my critique of another person’s behavior in objective terms but of the self-righteous tone of personal judgment that colors my opinion. … […]
Read More“If children today are at greater risk for obesity than those of previous generations, it’s not simply because they’re less physically active as a result of being absorbed in TV or computers. It’s primarily because under ordinary peacetime conditions there has never before been a generation so stressed and so starved of nurturing adult relationships. […]
Read More“… why I speak of the horror of sheer limitless successive existence. The desire simply to perdure forever, the resentful refusal to die–which at a deeper level is also the refusal to die into the now. But that sort of dying, that relinquishing of the past–that’s precisely what life is. It’s also a matter of […]
Read More“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 […]
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RJB
March 2, 2023
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