Transvaluation of Ethics

It astonishes me – the casualness, the callousness, the stupid matter-of-factness with which people can discuss euthanasia. People discuss putting their family members to sleep with only slightly more gravity than putting a pet to sleep. Why is abortion given a greater level of discretion in conversation than “pulling the plug”? Because starving someone to [...]

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Adjectives as Idols

Orthodox thinking doesn’t pair adjectives with the word “God”.
As I watch a spokesman for a group of fundamentalists talk about how “God is not a condemning god”, I realize that a simple way to express our apophaticism is to respond: Orthodox thinking doesn’t pair adjectives with the word “God”.
God is incomparable, indescribable, beyond understanding, not [...]

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I guess I’m a ethikotrogo-flexitarian

I was on the verge of coining a neologism: ethikotroge (or ethikotrogonist) when I discovered that I’m a flexitarian. I still might keep the overall neologism, since there is more than one reason for being a flexitarian. Someone looking at this in a public journal is likely to ask “What’s a flexitarian?”, so I’d better [...]

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The Heresy of the Supermarket

The TV news programs are drumming up the seige mentality again, for the nation of gluttony, over the growing starvation with which it has afflicted the world.
It blames high fuel costs, and blames those costs on China’s industrial growth rather than on America’s wars, before which fuel was reasonaby priced. It omits the fact that [...]

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Fear of Judgment is Wisdom’s Beginning

You know, in America, we’re all born into a culture of “once saved, always saved”. A Protestant-evangelical culture so strongly influenced by this tenet of Baptist religion, that even we Orthodox tend to think of ourselves as “in”, as somehow saved by affiliation, and somehow being of the Faith is reduced from a continual pattern [...]

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Whitewashed Faith

It’s an amazing thing. I live near two Orthodox mega-churches. They’re even on the same side of town as the other mega-churches. And they actually work the same way. There are a gazillion programs for people 20-40, for teens, for feminists… you name it, there’ a committee or a program for it. I think they [...]

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Welcome is not a Slip of Paper

Welcome is Prayer.
The other night I went to hear a speaker at a local church, and they had me fill out a “visitor’s slip” for their database, and they expressed welcome both personally and corporately. They served an excellent meal. They had a renowned speaker. The priest introduced himself and took an interest. They seemed [...]

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So much depends on this.

This broke my heart today: “You who sit there in utter misery, look up and show your friend your face. There is no darkness bears a cloak so black as could conceal your suffering. Why wave your hand to warn me of the taint of blood? For fear your words pollute me? I am [...]

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Gluttony of Delicacy

This is an entry in the comments of another article. It seems like it might also make a good article.
Each Winter stray cats starve and freeze to death in agonizing pain, whether in the country or in ordinary residential neighborhoods, right outside of abundant shelter and food. I always wanted to help, but I couldn’t [...]

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With Fear, Faith, and Love, Draw Near.

I have spent most of my younger Orthodox life being most concerned about offending God. Myself offending God. Others offending God. My people (us) offending God.
I’ve begun to think that God is most offended by how men act toward one another. Most offended by failure to love one another. By my failure. In other words, [...]

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The Union of All Creation

How imperfect the union of all men, that we pray for in the litanies.
Death, the fragmentation that sunders body and soul, that divides the soul (setting mind, will, and emotion at odds) also divides us from all men.
The first criminal psychologists were called Alienists, because they believed that behavior which alienates men from each other [...]

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The Eye of a Needle

I once had a spiritual advisor, Edie, and among the things that she helped me with was this: I was starting to lose heart, because I was poor. The people around me had been saying that it’s a sign of God’s judgment on me, and that I should be ashamed because I couldn’t pay my [...]

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The World is Turning

The Fast is coming. Can you feel it? The world is bending into leanness. The creation is a mystery. How we shun the first buds of Spring for the fullness of Spring, and prepare ourselves. The Fast is coming. At last, at last. Time that we can turn ourselves more fully into repentance, time we [...]

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Kafka and the Saints

I like Kafka. His treatment of the world is that of reductio ad absurdum. I find a lot of people, with a sort of evangelical framework, can’t understand my feeling at home in such things. Kafka gives us the world in its injustice, but reduces it to its utter mindlessness, its senility, its deprivation of [...]

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