Despite the undivided church coming together at the Council of Nicaea to lay out the basics of its understanding of the Trinity in the year AD325, the heresy of Arianism continued to flourish. If you’ll recall, Arianism posits that Jesus was not eternally present with God the Father but was rather a created being. That is why the Nicaean Creed states of Jesus;
Read MoreSt. Edward was born around the year 1003 and died in 1066. He reigned as King of England from 1042 until his death. It was a time of extended peace. Edward was the last undisputed English king before the Norman Conquest. The militant nature of that conquest resulted, at least in part it seems, from the fact that Edward promised succession to both a Norman and an Englishmen and left them to fight it out at the Battle of Hastings.
Read MoreCultures of optimization have been prevalent since the industrial revolution, but what distinguishes this current one is that it demands women to not just appear more perfect but actually to change themselves mentally and physically to meet an unattainable standard. I remember a mentor pointing out to me that the ‘it girl’ ideal shifted like a pendulum every decade from at least the 1890s onward in order to maximize consumer energy and disincentivize wardrobes that could be retained and bestowed between generations. This meant that each new decade one might find themselves more or less within reach of the cultural norm. By the 2000s, though, the use of digital and surgical technology enabled the creation of an appearance that no one could actually possess, and which made everyone inadequate.
Read MoreIn our last post, we concluded that acedia or sloth is much more than the stereotype of the lazybones. Evagrius notes that “acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, whereby the former is angry with what is at hand, while the latter yearns for what is not present.” As the modern monastic writer Gabriel Bunge elaborates: “Everything available to it is hateful. Everything unavailable is desirable.” Where there is anger that things are the way they are and there is an indefinite desire for something else, whatever that may be. Acedia is a restlessness that manifests in a refusal to commit to one place or purpose. In the meantime, acedia makes us lose our taste for what is significant and what is insignificant as we fail again and again to discern between demands for our attention.
Read MoreThe collect for the 10th Sunday after Trinity makes a curious request. After asking God to keep His ears open to our prayers, it asks Him to exercise His power over those very prayers: “. . . and, that [thy humble servants] may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee.”
Read MoreWhenever I hear ‘Montanism’ all I can think of is poor Vasily Borodin in ‘The Hunt for Red October’ uttering with his dying breath, ‘I would have liked to have seen Montana.’ Poor Vasily, who only wanted to live in Montana, marry a round American woman and drive a pickup truck... or maybe even a ‘recreational vehicle’. Sadly, it was not to be for Vasily, shot by the cook (who we all knew was up to something, the way the camera lingered on him in that one scene).
Read MoreLove obliges us to know our beloved. For Christians who worship God in the manner He gave us in the institution of Holy Communion, love obliges us to seek our Beloved in the sacramental place in which He has promised to meet us. To seek Him in this way will reveal, over time, the heart of our Eucharistic liturgy.
Read MoreTomorrow is Trinity Sunday, and I can’t help but hear in my head the rock n’ roll classic hit, “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake. Don’t mock me–it will forever and always be a rock and roll classic that will survive the ages and instantly bring me joy when I hear it. Just in case you’re not a regular listener of the “80’s on 8” Sirius XMU channel, to refresh your memory, the song opens with these lyrics:
Read MoreTomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost. In the week and a half since Ascension we have been waiting for the One Christ called the Holy Spirit to descend and meet us here. We have been opening our hearts and asking the Holy Spirit to come.
Read More“So like, hear me out. What if, like, Jesus, right? He was God, okay? Like, seriously, he’s God and all but how can he be a dude, too? God is huge and people are small, so like, He can’t be human and God at the same time. What if, no listen, like, his “body” isn’t really “his” body, it’s just like a video game avatar or a skin he wears? It’s like, an illusion, man! Blows your mind, right? Like, He’s God! He can do anything! He can make us see whatever He wants! He can appear like a human to us, so why wouldn’t he?”
Why indeed.
Read MoreWe are free.
The season of Eastertide begins on the night of the Easter Vigil, with a liturgy that poetically links the story of the Exodus with the story of salvation. Just as God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea, He delivers us from slavery to sin through the water of baptism. This parallel is brought out beautifully by the hymn we sing as we pass out of the sadness of Lent and into the joy of Easter:
Read MoreI’ll never forget the first time I received an icon. During the pandemic, a friend of my mom’s who is Coptic Orthodox let me pick any icon I wanted from her icon corner and keep it. I ended up choosing a very small two-panel icon, one side had St. Mary tenderly holding the Christ Child while the other had Christ holding scripture and giving a blessing. All of her icons were so beautiful; I didn’t understand how she was ready to part with any of them. But because of her generosity, I was able to experience the blessing of receiving an icon.
Read MoreDerived from the word ‘pelagic,’ from the Greek πέλαγος (pélagos) 'open sea,' Pelagic fish are those who do not live near the bottom or shore but out in the water… Oh, wait… I meant to google Pelagianism, not Pelagic fish. My apologies. We continue our survey of heresies with a look at Pelagianism.
Read MoreIn Lent, our fast cleared out new space in our lives and helped us re-examine our relationship with enjoyments and dependencies we tend to take for granted. Now, it is Easter, and we can go back to enjoying those things we left behind—we must celebrate, after all!—but in some cases, we find ourselves facing a conundrum when the TV habits, or social media scrolling, or regularity of chocolate-eating, or whatever-it-might-be, are again fair game. Namely: do we want to go back to those things? Do we still enjoy them? And if so, in what way do we want to go back to them?
Read MoreI am sometimes caught off guard at how my life’s events refuse to conform to the Christian calendar. Somewhere within me, I assume that the arrival of Easter should bring satisfying closure to the interior battles I fought during Lent. I love Eastertide, I love the renewal and the sense of hopeful expectation for the good work of ministry ahead. So why does it also feel like I’m back to the grind? Why has the world already moved along and why am I returned to the slow work of spiritual growth? For answers, I think we have to go back to Easter Day again.
Read MoreSabbath is remembrance. It is to remember and anticipate through a moment the world of God’s great seventh day, of Creation as it is known with God enthroned, consecrating all things and celebrating them with delight. But modern people have a difficult time approaching remembrance because they consider it a matter of ‘thinking’ rather than ‘being.’ This is not how the Scriptures communicate ‘remembrance’ to us.
Read MorePalm Sunday is our entrance into Holy Week. As we celebrate Christ’s Triumphal Entry with the citizens of Jerusalem, we process with them into the city where He will die. We sing songs and wave palm fronds on a morning that feels festive, hopeful, if a bit mundane – and perhaps we don’t think too far past the celebratory tone of the service, and the hymns, and the bright spring sunshine. It is Palm Sunday! Christ must be celebrated as He enters Jerusalem.
Read MoreAs a teacher and writer, words are the primary tools with which I try to exert power over reality. I use words to impress people so that they will love me, to create an image of myself that is eloquent and thoughtful and thus worthy of appreciation and respect. I use words to curate an orderly understanding of the universe, to narrate my experiences in ways that make sense to me. Both internally and externally, then, I use words to create a sense of security for myself. It is not difficult to see the fragility of this security. Because my worth is so bound up in words, I feel great pressure to generate them. The idea of being reduced to silence – of not being able to find the right words – is terrifying.
Read Moret’s attractive, isn’t it? That there is secret, hidden knowledge available to a few, select individuals and that you have been invited to share in its mysteries. If the great temptation of Christian theologians is to seek to overexplain and eliminate any hint of ambiguity, who furiously fret at the hem of anything that smacks of ‘mystery,’ unraveling as much as they can and sweeping anything leftover under the rug, thereby winding up in heresy, there is another path to heresy when people don’t understand Christianity as a unity within itself. In other words, if we are free to take stuff that we like and excise the parts we don’t, we wind up as heretics.
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