Archive

The Sins of Our Fathers – the Epigenetics of Shame

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 27, 2017 There is a new word and a new idea in science: epigenetics. It is the study of how the environment and experience alters our body – and alters it in a way such that it becomes part of our genetic legacy. It is, to the mind of some, a genetic form of inherited sin. That’s more than I know, and more than I care to say. But it

A One-Storey Neighborhood

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, August 21, 2015  In 2010 I published Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe. The articles examined the modern, secular tendency to see God (and religion) as belonging to a sphere somehow removed from daily life. God is there if you want Him, but absent if you don’t. It is a habit of thought that conveniently ignores one of the possible dividing lines in our so-called multi-cultural nation. If religion is a private matter,

Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition (Part II)

“Man’s Divorce from Nature” What I wish to suggest is a way to recover the lost cosmic dimension of religion by showing how it might be found again in the Christian tradition. What must be recovered above all is the vision — not only that religion needs to be imbedded in the cosmos, but also that the world is imbedded in God. For it is this loss that inevitably led to the separation of religion

Encyclical of His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew on the Environment: The Ecclesiastical New Year (Indiction), September 1, 2014

+ BARTHOLOMEW By God’s Mercy Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome And Ecumenical Patriarch To the Plenitude of the Church Grace and Peace from the Creator and Conserver of All Creation Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ Beloved brothers and children in the Lord, We have come to September 1st, the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, which the Ecumenical Patriarchate and subsequently the entire Orthodox Church designated as a day of prayer for the natural environment.

Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition (Part II)

“Man’s Divorce from Nature” What I wish to suggest is a way to recover the lost cosmic dimension of religion by showing how it might be found again in the Christian tradition. What must be recovered above all is the vision — not only that religion needs to be imbedded in the cosmos, but also that the world is imbedded in God. For it is this loss that inevitably led to the separation of religion