“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?

If Love Has Won, Has Marriage Lost?
An Orthodox Response to Obergefell v. Hodges

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.