Category: Uncategorized

  • Things Will Go Wrong: Missing Passport and Wallet Edition

    I’m waiting for a courier to deliver my passport (and maybe my wallet too?) to a hotel room in the middle of Lisbon. It’s the first time I have ever been properly stranded: no passport, no driver’s license, no credit cards, no insurance cards, no phone that works internationally. I’m still not entirely sure how…

  • There Won’t be any Night: Tromsø and Gregory of Nyssa

    Summer in the Arctic In the last chapter of the last book, there is vision of a completely changed world. John of Patomos writes in Revelation 22:1-5: 1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the…

  • Humanity’s First and Worst Journey:

    The Life of Adam and Eve 🍎 Genesis’s account of what happens to Adam and Eve directly after they are cursed for eating forbidden fruit is tantalizingly sparse. Genesis 3:20 – 24, the entire section between the curse and the conception of Cain, already east of Eden, reads: 20 The man named his wife Eve…

  • Banality of Evil: Israel and Palestine

    When people think of the Holocaust, one man comes to mind: Adolf Hitler. But, as Hannah Arendt argues in her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the Final Solution was not just orchestrated by Hitler or the Nazi Party. It relied on the compliancy and lack of resistance by citizens…

  • The Gospel for the World:

    *Dwight L. Moody and Jacob of Serugh*             In The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, Daniel G. Hummel lucidly explains the difficult topic of American end-times theology. And, as Hummel shows, before there was Left Behind, particular beliefs about end-times theology were popularized by the incredibly influential revivalist of the Reconstruction, Dwight L. Moody (d.…

  • Our Darkness is not Dark to You

    Advent, Week 1 in LA: In Isaiah 64, we read about a people yearning for God: 1O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,    so that the mountains would quake at your presence—2]as when fire kindles brushwood    and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries,    so that the nations…

  • Proto-Incel Biology:

    John Chrysostom on Women’s Hair in 1 Corinthians 11 There are a few similarities between the modern group known as incels and ancient Christian monks. John Chrysostom (d.407) , Homily 9 on 1 Timothy trans. Schaff: Anonymous Incels on the Internet[1] If it be asked, what has this to do with women of the present…

  • Hospitality to God?

    *Longing to Welcome God and Symeon the New Theologian* Anyone who knows me, knows that I love hospitality. I love hosting guests, and I love being a guest – whether it’s for a meal, a night, a week, six weeks, I love visiting and being visited. This semester, I will have five guests stay with…

  • “By Discovering a Death for Death”:

    Maximus the Confessor Ambigua X.29 and A Clockwork Orange… Every voyage must and should end. This life meant to be temporary – and, if we believe Maximus the Confessor (d. 662), this is not the same life originally given by God to humanity. There is another life, which the saints see, “divine and unchanging, which…

  • A Clash of Calendars

    Anyone who know me knows I love to schedule things. At the end of the week, I write out a schedule for the next week on a piece of paper, detailing my goals for each day. Then I schedule calls to friends, visits to the gym, fun activities. Sometimes I accomplish more than I imagined…