Archive

Saving My Neighbor – Just How Connected Are We?

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 9, 2017  If you are in the “helping professions,” confronting problems in people’s lives, it doesn’t take long to realize that no one is purely and simply an individual. The problems we suffer may occasionally appear to be “of our own making,” but that is the exception rather than the rule. Whether we are thinking of economic or genetic inheritance, or the psychological and social environment, almost all the issues

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

Getting Saved on Star Trek

By Father Stephen Freeman, November 1, 2017 Movies have a way of mirroring reality. They are cultural products, even if written by a single person. Our creative mind is formed and shaped in the reality we live. With that in mind, I have been thinking about the guys who wear red shirts on Star Trek episodes. In popular lore, they are the ones who are expendable. They show up in a single episode, maybe beam

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part III): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part II)

The biblical revelation, understood symbolically, confronts us with an uncompromising anthropocentrism, which is not physical but spiritual. Because Man is at once ‘microcosm and microtheos’, both a summing up of the universe and the image of God; and because God, in order to unite himself to the world, finally became a human being; humanity is the spiritual axis of all creation at every level, in every sphere. The saints see the universe in God, pervaded

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part II): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part I)

The universe is present to Man as the first revelation he receives, and it is his task to interpret it creatively, to give conscious utterance to the ontological praise of things. The world is also, in impersonally female guise, presented to Man, to be united with him in a mystical marriage, forming one flesh with him. The whole sensible universe is an extension of our body. Or rather, as we have already said, and in