Thank you very much for your good wishes with regard to my teaching award. God willing, it will provide some encouragement to those, whether fellow professors or students, who have every reason to wonder whether it's still possible to take a stand for Tradition in the...

The best spiritual state, it has been said, is one in which our heads are cool and our hearts are warm. The heart should be fervent, but we mustn't let this fervor "go to our head" as a sort of Pharisaical zeal, while in our heads we should be striving for the...

You ask whether there is anything "equivalent" to the Islamic Shahādah or the Jewish Shema in Christianity. I can think of several essentializations of our Way, including the text you mention, John 3:16. But if one is looking for something closer in form to these...

Yes, I'm quite familiar with "The Practice of Substituted Love", or rather with the chapter by that title in Charles Williams's He Came Down from Heaven, which (I agree) is one of this Oxford Inkling's most distinctively compelling pieces. I say "rather" because I've...

Yes, you heard me correctly in class the other day. I did say, "Scientists should stick to science and leave philosophy to grownups," and yes, I really meant it! Do remember, of course, that whenever I speak of "philosophy", I intend a great deal more than a merely...

I am planning once again to offer a short course during USC's upcoming "Maymester" (9-27 May 2011) on the contemplative spirituality of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. As was the case last year "Mysteries of the Christian East" will focus on the mystical theory and...

You ask whether I would have become Orthodox even if I'd lived in the tenth century "when there were no fully developed forms of mystical practice". I'm afraid you picked the wrong century if your aim was to show the absence of Hesychasm at earlier periods, for St...

Which comes first: liberation from the world or liberation from ourselves? I can see why you ask this, though it seems to me a mistake to suppose that the transformations in question are part of a strictly linear process or that the two freedoms are merely sequential....

The Gospel and Holy Tradition are very clear on this subject: one can, and should, pray for all needs: physical, psychological, and spiritual. But I confess I'm like you in this respect. I too have always found it difficult to ask God for something that's not...

You're puzzled, you say, by what seems an oxymoron. Filled with admiration for the many holy men and women of Russia who lived during the century and a half preceding the Revolution and "who spent their lives getting as close to God as they could and teaching others...