Monastery of the Holy Cross

“To the angel of the church in Pergamum write: ‘The words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword.  ’I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is; you hold fast my name and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among [...]

Brigitte Kahl’s excellent book Galatians Re-examined suffers at times from a certain overload of academic speech and jargon, along with ’semiotic square’ diagrams which, in my humble opinion, don’t advance the argument much if at all.  But much of the wealth of information is worth taking one’s time to wade through, as she paints a [...]

I sang for six years in the ecumenical choir at Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago.  Dean Bernard Brown, an Episcopalian with High Church leanings–very appropriate to the space–maintained the venerable tradition of learned Protestant Sunday sermons.  All of this was quite new to me, and fellow choristers more conversant in American Protestantism helped [...]

This week I would like to move on to some practical applications and reflections on the beginnings of praktike. We are composite creatures, made both of matter and of spirit. Therefore, sin affects us on both of these levels, although properly speaking, it is only owing to our spiritual nature that we are able to [...]

I took a break recently from translating Paul’s letter to the Galatians because I wanted a bit more time to standardize my choices of words with reference to arguments later in the letter.  In the meantime, I came upon a fantastic book, quite by happenstance (=Providence).  Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished [...]

In a previous post, I introduced the idea of the liturgy as constitutive of a culture.  I would like to offer an analogy to to this, to illustrate what I mean by ‘constitutive’, and then a practical application.
When we travel to another culture, we often find aspects of it disorienting; other aspects we may well [...]

Studying Darwin in college for an entire term was a terrific experience.  I wouldn’t say that this had a direct spiritual impact on me, but it did have many indirect influences.  I don’t doubt that some kind of evolution has taken place in the development of life.  I dispute Darwin’s conclusion that species originate through [...]

“A vast hierarchy of being–the non-living, the plants and the animals–was formed in these realms of essence.  At the highest, man in his rational-spiritual life was enabled to gather all lesser things into a unity unknown to the ancients and true to the revealed creation of God, into the unity of the macrocosm in all [...]

“If you knew the gift of God.” This phrase, embedded in the Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, can easily pass by us if we are not listening closely with our hearts. Who of us really knows the gift of God? We might imagine that somehow as baptized Christians and not Samaritans [...]

Today it is common, indeed a cliche, to hear persons claim to be spiritual but not religious. This is most often diagnosed as something connected to individualism, personal freedom of choice, a preference for feelings and an uncertainty regarding metaphysical claims of religions. Religious ceremonies feel to many inauthentic, perhaps even manipulative. I would like [...]