Sacred Space as Public Place (Part 1)
May 24, 2018
Augustin IoanHumans never interact with their environment without metaphysical consequence. That is, the world becomes, or is discovered to be, a repository of meaning. Sometimes the meaning points beyond what at first seems to be there, as when we encounter the sacred. But what is the sacred, and how does the numinous dwell in the physical world? Moreover, how does man dwell with it? In this first of two essays exploring such questions, Romanian architect Augustin Ioan draws on Heidegger, Deleuze, and others to help us find our place in space.
August 12, 2017 Jason Morgan
Mortal man may yet be saved, some say, but there is a doom upon the brutes: when it's over for Rover, it's over forever, and anything else is sentimentalism. That account may score points in certain quarters, but is it really so sound? If the goodness, peace, and joy that we experience in time are epiphanic of Eternity, then surely we ought to take such phenomena seriously, even when we find them in animals. Looking back on the life of a beloved family dog, Jason Morgan asks us to reconsider whether there isn't something beyond the sentiments, after all, and if so, whether man's best friend might not finally be spared the grave.
January 11, 2017 “Have mercy on me, a poet!” To many, the vocations of the poet and the monk seem incompatible. The young Thomas Merton, having had a taste of each, considered the former immanent, worldly, and vain, whereas the latter was “transcendent”, sacred, concerned with the “reality of God”. But there are many poets, even of a secular cast, whose ethos bears striking similarities to the ancient mystical practice of hesychia, or stillness. If these similarities are more than coincidental, why are there so few hesychast-poets? Could there be such a thing as a deliberate hesychastic poetics? If so, what would its praxis look like? If not, is that all the worse for poetry, or for monasticism?
April 10, 2016 On the northwest coast of the Black Sea, beyond even where the Emperor Augustus banished Ovid, lies the Romanian town of Tulcea. Like many Romanian cities, it was a focal point for the confluence of a dizzying array of cultures: Slavic, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Tatar, Armenian, and more. And, like cities everywhere, its social fabric was reflected and transmitted in its built environment. It was a remembered past and a lived present in stone and wood. Thirty years after the fall of the regime that “systematized” its urban core, one of the country's leading architects reflects on the cityscape that shaped his childhood in Tulcea and offers quiet hope for its future.
March 27, 2016 The Christian religion has at its center the Resurrection of the Christ, without which, St. Paul says, the faith is in vain, and through which we, too, are to rise. To what sort of life? It is not that of an abstracted, disembodied spirit, but that of an entire person, body and soul, whole again, and transfigured. In this sermon from his days as Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, preaching to a society drawn to materialism on the one hand and 'angelism' on the other, John Henry Newman meditates on Christ's invocation of the burning bush as a sign that we – our bodies included – "die but to appearance", a sign of the incarnate eternity that awaits us on the far side of the grave.
March 6, 2016 Last summer, the United States Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a constitutional right for all citizens, and that laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. What does this mean for the Church? Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian argues for a rediscovery of the centrality of the Eucharist in Christian matrimony – and for the Church's immediate disengagement from the civil marriage business. May 6, 2015 In the 1790s, the once-great Polish Commonwealth had been carved up by the neighboring empires of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. But, in spite of the long century of repression that followed – a time when Siberia was known as the "Polish Golgotha" – the Poles' chivalric spirit and love of their homeland survived. In the 1920s, shortly after the victory of the newly independent Republic of Poland over Lenin's expansionist Soviet Union, G.K. Chesterton himself travelled to the country. And, filled as ever with the joy of discovering truths at the bottom of apparent paradoxes, he found poetry in their cavalry.
February 16, 2015
Inevitably, says farmer-poet Wendell Berry, we come to inhabit two worlds: the one that actually is, and the one we imagine. Navigating between them isn't easy – not least because, in nearly every one of us today, "two minds" are at war with each other over the privilege of steering our course.
January 23, 2015 Today's West is concerned with 'sustainability' almost to the point of obsession: of resources, of companies, of cars, of vacations. But Europe, argues one of its leading thinkers, finds itself in the middle of a centuries-old experiment that puts the sustainability of not only its own existence but that of all mankind on the line. How did we get here? And do we have the metaphysical goods to get ourselves out? December 5, 2014 
Eulogy for Skip
‘Stillness in Rhythm’: Hesychastic Poiesis
A Space of Forbearance
Augustin Ioan
The Resurrection of the Body
If Love Has Won, Has Marriage Lost?
An Orthodox Response to Obergefell v. Hodges
The Polish Ideal
Two Minds
Europe: ‘Too old for its own truths and victories’?
Read more...
Clarion Vines: A Column for the Future Wines of History
Plato’s thoughts on love in the Symposium are shared over wine; Jesus offers eternal life together with the Source of All in the drink. In this new column, Executive Editor Jonathan D. Price will review wines for the prospective drinker: What should I pay? How long should I wait? Is there any accounting for taste? As he does so, he will also encourage the reader to develop a phronema for the proper enjoyment of wine: not as a mere sensory thrill, but as a gateway to contemplation of the sublime.
