When I was young, I read a famous poem that I now regard as one of the strangest poems ever written. It is the one entitled “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas with its repeated refrain “do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
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Surveying the Old Testament
When I was a child in grade five, I was given a New Testament by the Gideon Society, like everyone else in my grade. Note: the New Testament, not the entire Bible. I suspect that the decision to confine the gift to the New Testament Scriptures was dictated more by economics than by theology—after all, there were a lot of kids in the schools in those days and giving an entire Bible to each one of them would have cost a lot. Nonetheless the decision tended to give the impression that it was only the New Testament that mattered and that the Old Testament didn’t count for much for Christians.
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Tithing Mint
I am often asked by catechumens questions of basic liturgical etiquette, such as how to enter the church, how to venerate an icon, and when to make the sign of the cross. I am always happy to explain and (if in church) to demonstrate, since these are things that Orthodox people should know and do instinctively. They are part of forming an Orthodox mind and approach to life and worship. But there is a danger in answering such questions without first placing them in a wider context, because answering them without context might give the erroneous impression that Orthodoxy is all about rules.
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All Kinds of Everything
There are, I suggest, two ways to experience the world. The first is that of the materialist: the world is all that exists. The physical world that we see and experience has no real or intrinsic meaning; it just is. We can, if we like, endow it with meaning from our own heads, but such meaning would be entirely subjective. Religion or philosophy, they say, might imagine that meaning can be discerned in world, but this is an illusion.
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I Don’t Believe in Christianity
I recently read in Jaroslav Pelikan’s excellent Jesus Through the Centuries a line from American scholar Arthur O. Lovejoy, who asserted, “The term ‘Christianity’ is not the name for any single unit of the type for which the historian of specific ideas looks.” Rather, the term describes “a series of facts which, taken as a whole, have almost nothing in common except the name”. At first I thought his statement was absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was true. And that I did not believe in Christianity. Please let me explain.
Netherlands