Posts tagged culture

In 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.

Christian Life, Spiritual FormationFr. Hayden ButlerSeptember 16, 2023acedia, productivity, culture

Tradition in a Reactive Culture

In my last essay, I unpacked some of the origins of deconstruction and pointed out how it is an inevitable product of modernity. Deconstruction pulls at the possibility of relationships, of symbol and meaning, of self to self. Deconstruction is the perfection of modernity’s idolizing of the self; it reduces all who practice it to irretrievable isolation within themselves. In the end, deconstruction leads the practitioner to lock the door from the inside of themselves, subjecting what is left of themselves to an endless ruminating scrutiny. They end in something like despair (although I do not know precisely what to call it because even despair seems too constructive a term). Yet, for all of the grim by-products of deconstruction, many questioning Christians are turning to it as a desperate last resort…

Theology, Christian LifeFr. Hayden ButlerJuly 22, 2023tradition, deconstruction, culture, reactivity, anxiety

St. Matthew’s Church Blog