William Desmond On Prayer

Prayer may be the deepest enactment of the intimacy of being; for the praying self is the most idiotic. It is senseless and yet divines sense beyond sense. It is given over, yet it is the audacity of trust. It is elemental vulnerability and appeal, elemental perplexity and consent, elemental confession and renewal, elemental adoration […]

Contra Turner

Denys Turner writes: “Eating lambs goes with being a lion; being a lamb-eating machine is more or less what a lion is. And more generally nature seems to require a level of raw indifference in matters of tooth and claw. If there is to be variety and complexity in the natural world we know, including […]

Nulla Salus Nulla Creatio

Because creation and redemption are inseparable, God’s decision to create is one with his choice to perfect creation. His providential love is identical with his continued act of creatio ex nihilo; therefore creatio ex nihilo ensures universal salvation. There is no additional act added to the act of creation. And, consequently, without God’s providential act […]

The Roots of Christian Mysticism (Chapters 2 and 3)

Clement reminds us that, although creation reveals something about God’s glory, God is not limited by any category. God is not an object to be grasped within or outside the cosmos. God is not an object at all. He is the ground and desire of all beings. Clement insists on this point again and again […]

The Roots of Christian Mysticism (Chapter 1)

Olivier Clement’s classic book is a commentary on the mystical reflections of the most influential Christians in the first millennium of the Church. The work is divided into three major parts which consist of patristic meditations on the doctrine of God (part I), on spiritual exercises (part II), and on contemplation (part III). Such distinctions […]

Berdyaev On Personality and Suffering

Personality is not only capable of experiencing suffering, but in a certain sense personality is suffering. The struggle to achieve personality and its consolidation are a painful process. The self-realization of personality presupposes resistance, it demands a conflict with the enslaving power of the world, a refusal to conform to the world. . . . […]

Hans Urs Von Balthasar: Predestination

“When God’s universal plan for the world, for its creation as for its redemption, thus definitively moves into view, it becomes impossible to interpret the doctrine of election in the Old and New Covenants, with their clear preference for one individual vis-à-vis others, other than as a moment within this universal plan. . . . […]

The Thomistic Problem of the Sufferings of Hell

In my university days, I found C.S. Lewis’s notion of Hell compelling. And although I hold to some form of apokatastasis now, I still find Lewis’s understanding of Hell persuasive, at least as temporary punishment. In my Thomistic phase I had to let go of this understanding of Hell. The problem of the pains of […]

An Ode to Traditionalists and Company

Angels and men Strangers and kin Live without doubt As all know their route Lives without fear Their God is so near: And easy is prayer For them not a care Who can suffer these magicians So also their false politicians?

Bulgakov’s Vatican Dogma (Notes)

Part I Sergius Bulgakov has written a trenchant critique of the Vatican’s move to define the absolute authority of the pope and the dogmatization of the pontiff’s infallibility apart from the whole Church. He contends not only that real discussion was stifled at the council by Pope Pius IX himself but also that it was […]