thinking Archives - Saint Sophia

The Secular Mind Versus the Whole Heart

10/02/2023

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, July 6, 2017 Thinking is among the most misleading things in the modern world, or, to be more precise, thinking about thinking is misleading. For a culture that puts such a great emphasis on materiality, our thinking about thought is decidedly spooky. The philosophy underlying our strangely-constructed modernity is called nominalism (of which there are many formal varieties). Its imaginary construct of the world consists of decidedly separate objects, united only by our thinking

Do You Know God?

10/29/2021

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 29, 2016 My childhood was surrounded with very committed Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians. Street preaching was quite common and even expected. In the downtown, the bus stopped in front of the Dollar Store before it made its trip to the Southside where I lived. Those waiting for buses were a captive audience. Saturdays especially brought bright young men with floppy Bibles and crew-cuts. They were largely students from Bob Jones University.

From the Beginning – True Authorial Intent

07/16/2021

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, January 5, 2016 I read a discussion concerning my earlier article on allegory in which someone identified himself as a writer. He stated that if a reader saw something in his writing that he had not intended, then either he or his reader had failed. His statement is an extreme example of what is called “authorial intent”: what the author intends for the reader to see is indeed what the reader

What Is the False Self?

06/24/2019

Your egoic false self is who you think you are, but your thinking does not make it true. Your false self is a social and mental construct to get you started on your life journey. It is a set of agreements between you and your parents, your family, your school chums, your partner or spouse, your culture, and your religion. It is your “container.” It is largely defined in distinction from others, precisely as your separate and

Watching the River

07/17/2017

To live in the present moment requires a change in our inner posture. Instead of expanding or shoring up our fortress of “I”–the ego–which culture and often therapy try to help us do, contemplation waits to discover what this “I” consists of. What is this “I” that I take so seriously? To discover the answer, we have to calmly observe our own stream of consciousness and see its compulsive patterns. That’s what happens in the

THE LAMP OF THE BODY (Part II)

06/27/2013

YOUR EYE IS THE LAMP OF YOUR BODY; WHEN YOUR EYE IS SOUND, YOUR WHOLE BODY IS FULL OF LIGHT; BUT WHEN IT IS NOT SOUND, YOUR BODY IS FULL OF DARKNESS. —LUKE 11:34 Look into yourself and examine your reactions to persons and situations, and you will be appalled to discover the prejudiced thinking behind your reactions. It is almost never the concrete reality of this person or thing that you are responding to.

Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

06/18/2012

We are all powerless, not only those physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking. We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the

Archive

The Secular Mind Versus the Whole Heart

Do You Know God?

From the Beginning – True Authorial Intent

What Is the False Self?

Watching the River

THE LAMP OF THE BODY (Part II)

Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

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