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“Every fowl of tyrant wing”
I see that both Europeanizing ideological imports and Americentric party-political branding remain in vogue; a spectre abroad as contradictory attempts by liberals (including conservatives) to align with forms forbidden by really existing capitalism: be it liberal, conservative, socialist, republican, democratic, traditional, etc. I have found a substance only in real encounters of the West with…
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The once and future tense?
Why has the future tense come to displace the present in certain renditions of the Words of Institution? “This is my body which will be given up for you”? Weak tea, I say. Count me firmly in the camp of “This is my body which is given up (or, better, which is broken for you).”…
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Catholicism in the Ruins?
Both the commenter and the quasi-archetypal Catholic being critiqued are unhealthily nostalgic for a past era when the Church was a cultural force to be reckoned with. Cultural Catholicism has been dying on the vine for years, leaving only the diehards and weirdos who really care in an at times “autistic” manner that chafes the…
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A New Project: Returning to the Name Copious Flowers with a Subscription Newsletter
This current year of 2023 is my 14th year of blogging. From 2011 to 2021, I blogged at Copious Flowers and almost exclusively just shared favorite passages from material that I was reading. In December 2021, I started this WordPress team blog called Jesus and the Ancient Paths. It was great to have many other…
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UFOs, Apple Pie, and That Old-Time Religion: A Reflection on Diana Walsh Pasulka’s American Cosmic
Introduction As someone who grew up in a Chinese culture on a South Pacific island during the first 18 years of my life, American culture will always remain more than a little mysterious to me. A case in point is the fact that, in our current Congress, the topic with the most significant bi-partisan support…
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Where Did This World Come From and What is Happening Here?
This world of ours is obviously a strange mix of good and evil. There is astonishing and inspiring balance, harmony, vision, and beauty on display alongside devastating and utterly irrational suffering, loss, blindness, and incompletion. So much is left unseen and unfinished in every moment, and yet every moment also carries a depth of significance…
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On trying to be an Orthodox philosopher (part 3 of 3)
(Note: This is part three in a series written as a draft for a chapter I’m contributing to the forthcoming Volume 2 of Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith (SVS Press). In part one (here), I talk about my early upbringing that set the stage for my interest in philosophy and in…
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On trying to be an Orthodox Philosopher (Part 2 of 3)
(Note: This is part two in a series written as a draft for a chapter I’m contributing to the forthcoming Volume 2 of Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith (SVS Press). In part one (here), I talk about my early upbringing that set the stage for my interest in philosophy and in…
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On trying to be an Orthodox Philosopher (Part 1 of 3)
(Note: This is part two in a series written as a draft for a chapter I’m contributing to the forthcoming Volume 2 of Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith (SVS Press). In this post, I talk about my early upbringing that set the stage for my interest in philosophy and in Orthodoxy.…
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Turning the Witness
Our task as Christians is to prove Logos self-evident to man as the ethical fulfillment of meaning’s horizon. In this line of dutiful paradosis we are infinitely culpable. How strenuously he labors in beauty’s way, deforming the most abysmal face that ever peered out creation’s four-way mirror upon the fundamental likeness of they who paint…
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In Anticipation of Pascha
This reflection is a fool’s mission, but it seems absurd not to make an attempt at describing this season of Holy Week. Our priest reminds us to keep silent this Holy Saturday as Christ is in the tomb, but these thoughts reach for nothing and contain no conclusions. They are the sound of my silence…
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On Holy Saturday
Note: this was taken from an informal, online share by David Armstrong and posted with his permission. Jesus is dead in the tomb. We should pause for a minute to acknowledge that at least in the external world, nothing was likely very perceptively different that Sabbath. Birdsong continued unabated; flowers went on blooming; Jewish families…
Got any book recommendations?
Theophaneia | dispatches from the eighth clime 