By Father Stephen Freeman, May 11, 2018 Our culture changes things. One of its myths is that changing things results in a better world. And so we endure unending advertisements for the newest, the latest, and the improved. Very few things, apart from medications, are tested for their consequences. As such, we are a society in perpetual experiment. It reminds me of a local joke. The last words of a redneck … “Hold my beer.
By Father Stephen Freeman, February 22, 2018 Your judgments are like the great deep, O Lord, You will save men and beasts. (Psalm 36:6) The notion of justice in Scripture is rather straightforward. It has to do with proper order and balance. The one who has much should not exploit his advantage and oppress the one who has little. In all things, there will be an accounting. And in the accounting, things will be “set
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, January 30, 2018 We live in a world of practicality, a fact that has produced the marvels of technology that power us along and connect the world in its web. I have a nearly two-year-old grandson who has grasped some of this connection for many months now. He loves buttons – not the ones on your shirt – but the ones on any device. If there is a button in reach,
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on June 16, 2020 George Mantzarides, Professor Emeritus of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Saint Sophrony, from Essex, said that the greatest sin these days is that people have sunk into despair and no longer believe in the resurrection. In the pre-Christian era, and later in the world outside Christianity, there was widespread belief in the immortality of the soul. But even this belief has been abandoned in our own
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on August 22, 2021 Archimandrite Ephraim, Abbot of the Vatopaidi Monastery Nowadays when science and technology are flying, when cultures converge and there is a crisis in values, even the word ‘death’ is avoided and anything reminiscent of it is ignored and discarded. Modern man views death as something negative and as a loss; we usually say for the departed: ‘We’ve lost him’. Whoever does not have the proper knowledge about this issue of
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, May 30, 2017 When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac (Genesis 22), there was no questioning on Abraham’s part about what was intended. He understood precisely what was involved in such a thing. There was wood to be gathered, an altar of stones to be constructed, the victim to be bound, and then the slitting of its throat with the gushing forth of blood, all consummated in the burning
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on March 2, 2022 George Mantzarides, Professor Emeritus of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki The rejection of Christ, but also his acceptance by many, is an enduring phenomenon which can be seen in our own age, too. He himself said to his disciples: ‘If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you. If they have obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also’ (Jn. 15, 20). The world in general
Thoughts on our problems and our hearts By Michael Haldas, July 25, 2016 “There are many devotees of the idolatrous cult of technical know-how…Many tragic and deadly problems hold the world in thrall: epidemics, wars, inexcusable hunger, repression, crime, despotism, and the loss of arable land and clean water. Many of these are intractable problems that technical solutions alone cannot fix…Technology and social engineering cannot correct people who devise wickedness and scheme evil on their
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, October 19, 2015 Words have a way of getting hijacked. Language refuses to stay unchanged and the result can be confusion, particularly when language is compared across the centuries. A common sentiment, written in one century, can be taken to mean something completely different in another. Such is the case with the word “rational.” The word was hijacked around the 18th century and has become a chief accomplice in the misdoings of
By David Bentley Hart, October 2003 The word “nihilism” has a complex history in modern philosophy, but I use it in a sense largely determined by Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom not only diagnosed modernity as nihilism, but saw Christianity as complicit in its genesis; both it seems to me were penetratingly correct in some respects, if disastrously wrong in most, and both raised questions that we Christians ignore at our peril. Nietzsche’s case
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