Tag archive for ‘worldview’
Don’t defend your ideas – spread them
How to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread? Don’t. Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas.
How about some Advent?
Maria von Trapp writes: Who can describe our astonishment, however, when a few days after our first Thanksgiving Day we heard from a loudspeaker in a large department store the unmistakable melody of “Silent Night”! Upon our excited inquiry, someone said, rather surprised: “What is the matter? Nothing is the matter. Time for Christmas shopping!” …
The Enlightenment and Evangelicals
One of the common complaints against traditional evangelicalism is that it has been held captive by a distinctly Western approach to rationality. The central target of this complaint is the “Enlightenment,” with its emphasis on reason to the detriment of revelation.
Hallowe’en: An Orthodox approach
Every year, on Hallowe’en, I sit on the front porch of my house with a bowl of candy, a box of beeswax candles, and a large icon for the Feast of All Saints. Every child who comes to the house gets a piece of candy, and may also light a candle and place it before the icon.
The Bible is not a bible
The great power and theological depth of the Scripture is found within these points of tension, and again within the tension between our lives today and the various parts of this ancient collection of books. The Bible is like a stringed instrument in this respect. It only works because of great tension. Stop trying to take the tension out of the Bible. If you take away the tension, smoothing over and dumbing down and making everything instructions and promises, all you get is a poorly tuned instrument and really bad music.
God is not a god
I take it for granted that when we talk about God we are not talking about a god, a large and powerful member of the genus ‘gods’ who just happens to be the only one. We are talking, in the wake of the great Hebrew breakthrough into monotheism in the post-exilic period, of God who is not one of the gods.
A Glimpse into Eastern Orthodox Christian religion
There is a common Western tendency to criticize common Western tendencies. I’ve seen Christians eager to criticize Western tendencies. I’ve also seen liberals who were not Christian criticize Western tendencies. Criticizing “Western tendencies” is a Western thing to do.
An Interview with Sister Aemiliane
Orthodox theology seemed to me so obviously more adequate, natural, and just… true. There were other things that I didn’t understand, didn’t like, or was repelled by, but one thing that I understood was that these people knew about prayer. They knew about the connection between the mind and the body. Those were enough to interest me. I still had an attract/repel relationship with the Church. I had to turn inside out in order to enter the Church…
It’s nothing personal
One of the most frightening phrases in the English language is: “It’s nothing personal.” It almost always precedes something bad. For someone to tell me that what they are about to do is not personal is already a confession of sin. In the life of the Eastern Church few words could be more important. Oddly there is not a single definition for the term, and yet there is agreement as to its importance. The Elder Sophrony stressed what he called the “cardinal importance of the personal dimension in being.” More…
Practical apocalypticism
The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the swords are not as strong as they think. It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe…
Out of the mouths of babes and atheists…
“Mankind is more than the janitor of planet Earth,” writes Brendan O’Neill. “I am avowedly atheist. But listening to the bishops’ drab, eco-pious Christmas sermons, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Bring back God!’”
I am a Spiritual Materialist!
God looked upon what He had done and said “It is very good.” This certainly includes matter. Evil often surfaces, not from the material itself, but from the misuse and misdirection of “things” thus differing from the plan of the Creator. The dour, grim, unsmiling deviation which one sometimes finds in neurotic Christians is hardly within our real tradition…
Pietism as an ecclesiological heresy
Pietism made its appearance as a distinct historical movement within Protestantism, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, around 1690-1730. 1 Its aim was to stress “practical piety,” as distinct from the polemical dogmatic theology to which the Reformation had initially given a certain priority. Under different forms and in various “movements,” it has not ceased to influence Protestantism, and indeed also the spiritual life of other churches, to this day…
The River of Fire
The devil managed to make men believe that God does not really love us, that He really only loves Himself, and that He accepts us only if we behave as He wants us to behave; that He hates us if we do not behave as He ordered us to behave, and is offended by our insubordination to such a degree that we must pay for it by eternal tortures, created by Him for that purpose. Who can love a torturer? Even those who try hard to save themselves from the wrath of God cannot really love Him. They love only themselves, trying to escape God’s vengeance and to achieve eternal bliss by managing to please this fearsome and extremely dangerous Creator.
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