A Traveling Theology

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…

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…

*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…

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…

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…

We often like to think of ourselves as adaptable and accepting of other places and other cultures. Sometimes, as much as none of us really want to admit it, that means sort of minimizing cultures down into intelligible symbols we understand rather than trying to understand them on their own terms. Sometimes, it means in…

Jesus warns us that heaven and earth will pass away (Matt 24:35) but there is a way in which life here makes that feel distant. Paul adds his voice, warning us that “the present form (σχῆμα, ‘appearance’) of this world is passing away”. Jesus and Paul both urge us to invest in eternal, unseen heavenly…

I vividly remember the joy and excitement of my high school graduation in 2014. There was a sense of victory, for having slogged through IB exams (though scores were still pending), committed to a school whose name I could not pronounce (Bryn Mawr), and largely finished what I had set out to do. I was…

            At the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, there is an amazing sculpture that can only be appreciated from the sky.  You can see it, when you look up the Museum on Google Maps: “PICTURE THIS!” the sculpture says – a message for birds, for God, for the Maps Staff. On the ground,…

Augustine’s Literal Interpretation of Genesis This blog, “A Traveling Theology” has a fundamentally optimistic view of life on Earth. Our time here as sojourners is a difficult adventure, where we are tourists in a strange place. Through the process of experiencing creation, both the good things about life and the bad, we come to know…