I'm currently teaching my "Introduction to Religious Studies"—an essentialized approach to the key doctrines and spiritual practices of the world's major orthodox religions—and I gave the students an opportunity last week to pose questions for an open...

Thank you for sharing your experience working with this hospice patient. What you said of your final conversations with the woman reminded me of something C. S. Lewis wrote shortly after the death of his great friend Charles Williams. It was not that his friend had...

I believe you're making this much more complicated than it needs to be. By its very nature, a mantray?na gives us a sacred object upon which to concentrate, namely (in our case) the Name of God. But we don't need to "narrow our consciousness by an intense...

You want to know whether the following is a threat to Anselm's ontological argument: 1. The only way to prove something a priori is if its opposite is a contradiction. 2. If something is a contradiction, it is inconceivable. 3. Everything can be conceived not to...

I can see from your letter that there are several rather serious errors in your thinking. First of all, you need to come to terms with the fact that all religions are made in such a way that their adherents think them the best, if not the only, means of salvation;...

Why do I think most modern academic religionists are so opposed to perennialism? Because they're mostly relativists, and perennialists are absolutists. Or, if you prefer, because most scholars are confused as to what is truly "abstract" and what is truly "concrete"....

Having started down a path toward Orthodoxy, you're now having "second thoughts" and are thinking instead of a return to Islam. Do I know of any "similar cases"? It's a strange coincidence—or so it would seem from our perspective in time—but I received...

Word is that administrators at La Trobe University in Australia have decided to scrap their thriving program in perennialist and traditionalist studies. Harry Oldmeadow, author of Traditionalism: Religion in Light of the Perennial Philosophy as well as a number of...

What you describe is entirely normal, and your way of describing it is accurate, if a bit casual! The ego is indeed fighting against being "downsized". Longer, more discursive prayers give the ego a certain amount of elbow room, as it were; we can "sleep" between...

Believe me, I'm keenly aware of the problems you're facing, and I thank God every day I'm not just starting out, as you are, in the college teaching business. May Heaven guard and defend you. For "business" is precisely what it's become, at least at big universities...