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The Eighth Day of Christmas Advent. An Illegal Christmas

11/22/2024

By Father Stephen Freeman The great advantage to thinking about God in legal terms, is that nothing has to change. If what happens between us and God is entirely external, a matter of arranging things such as the avoidance of eternal punishment or the enjoyment of eternal reward, then the world can go on as it is. In the legal model that dominates contemporary Christian thought, the secular world of things becomes nothing more than

The Twenty-Fourth Day of Christmas Advent. What a Caveman Said: To Perceive That Which Is Eternal

12/08/2023

Fr. Stephen Freeman, October 27, 2020 Fr. Alexander Schmemann described “secularism” as the greatest heresy of our time. He didn’t describe it as a political movement, nor a threat from the world outside Christianity. Rather, he described it as a “heresy,” that is, a false teaching from within the Christian faith. What is secularism? Secularism is the belief that the world exists independent of God, that its meaning and use are defined by human beings.

The Holy and Great Council and the Hidden Work of God

02/28/2022

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 5, 2016 The science of psychology had its beginnings in the 19th century. It has since gone through many changes, complete with clinical science of the brain and its chemistry. However, in its earliest days it had something of a mystical twist. Freud, Jung and their cohort could see the surface of the personality and the various disorders it presented. Their instinct was that the causes of those disorders lay somewhere

We Are Not Here to Help

01/11/2021

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, October 21, 2015 My writings are sometimes treated as though I’m offering some new insight. That only tells me that the reader has only just begun to read. I pray God never to be original in my thoughts, for I long for nothing other than the Tradition. At best, I simply bring the Tradition back into the conversation again and again. I offer here a short passage from Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s For

A Parable of a Kingdom

07/24/2020

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, August 12, 2020 There was a wicked kingdom in which there lived a large number of slaves. The kingdom fought wars, built cities and was extremely successful in growing its economy. Its achievements were the envy of all the other kingdoms. The slaves did well, too. They were not given low jobs or manual labor. Instead, they were “helping” slaves. Their task was to help the people of the Kingdom get by.

Fifth Monday of Pascha. Being Saved—The Ontological Approach

05/18/2020

By Father Stephen Freeman, May 24, 2019 I cannot begin to count the number of times I wished there were a simple, felicitous word for “ontological.” I dislike writing theology with words that have to be explained – that is, words whose meanings are not immediately obvious. But, alas, I have found no substitute and will, therefore, beg my reader’s indulgence for dragging such a word into our conversations. From the earliest times in the

The Secular Challenge

01/24/2020

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 12, 2015 Fr. Alexander Schmemann held that secularism was the single greatest challenge of the modern era. I took up this understanding and made it the heart of my book, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe. It is at the heart of every serious challenge the Church faces in our time. The news is not so good. A recent article by Damian Thompson in the British publication, The Spectator, estimates that at the

The Third Day of Christmas Advent. An Illegal Christmas

11/17/2017

By Father Stephen Freeman The great advantage to thinking about God in legal terms, is that nothing has to change. If what happens between us and God is entirely external, a matter of arranging things such as the avoidance of eternal punishment or the enjoyment of eternal reward, then the world can go on as it is. In the legal model that dominates contemporary Christian thought, the secular world of things becomes nothing more than

God and Caesar (Part VI): Towards a Creative Secularism

01/26/2015

In the inescapably pluralist life of the city today, Christians must strive for a creative secularism. An open civilization, free from ideocracy, must not be a spiritual desert abandoned to the instincts by the blind forces of production. Kirkegaard thought it necessary ‘to go more deeply into man as he actually exists’ before daring to speak to him of God. More than a thousand years before, the hardiest of ascetics, St John Climacus, remarked that

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