In his book on the Shaykh Al-Alawi, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, Martin Lings comments on one of the Shaykh's aphorisms: "To demand increase showeth ignorance in a disciple." According to Lings, this saying refers among other things to the ignorance of...

You asked about current and upcoming courses. Classes just started this week for me, and I'm offering two. First is an old standby I call "Faith, Doubt, and God". Close to seventy brave souls have shown up to test my in-your-face promise to prove the existence of God....

You're "astonished", you say, that Saint Thomas Aquinas should be so highly praised in Professor Oldmeadow's book concerning the perennialist school: Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of Perennial Philosophy (soon to be republished by World Wisdom, in a revised...

You asked about the role—or perhaps better the "position"—of Christ in Christian prayer. It is common among the Fathers of the Christian East, and thus among many Orthodox authorities, to say that one should pray "in" the Holy Spirit, "through" Jesus...

No, I'd not in fact heard of the formulation you quote from Father John Romanides: "If the Church were a factory, its product would be relics." And no, I wasn't thinking of things in quite so osteopathic a way when I spoke in my last post about the "production of...

In the American South where I teach, the question comes up much less frequently, I expect, than in your part of the world. But yes, there are certainly a few people here, including the occasional student, who claim to be practicing "pagans". Obviously, the first...

Yes, my students too are always quite puzzled—and often worried that I mean to undermine their faith—when I tell them there are some things even God can't do. In my Theology course the issue first arises when, in lecturing on the doctrine of creation ex...

What is my "political stance"? Students often ask me this question, especially around election time. It's clear to them, of course—as I'm sure it is to you—that I'm no liberal, or not at least in the way that describes the overwhelming majority of my...

You say you've felt a "fundamental resistance" to the Christian form, you're "lukewarm" toward its theology, and you sense the teachings of Islam may conform more closely to your sense of the Divine Presence within the natural environment. But it's unclear to me why...

"Weird, floating feelings" are not the summum bonum, as you obviously know. Indeed the Fathers stress that feelings as such, of whatever kind or modality, are at best irrelevant, and sometimes dangerous. It's a mistake in any case to put too much stock in them or to...