You're right to have realized that a serious engagement with the spiritual life entails a radical shift in one's thinking about everything else. A commitment to Tradition, together with the initiatic affiliation it presupposes, is not something that can simply be...

The problem you describe is by no means uncommon, for it's one thing to see—and to be rightly disgusted by—the pernicious consequences of reductionism and something quite different to be able to justify that disgust dialectically. You're right to think...

The first thing to point out, of course, is that I'm a mere layman, and I would not wish to mislead you by presuming to anticipate what your spiritual father may ask of you during confession itself. Different confessors have different "styles", reflecting their...

As I always tell the prospective professors who come my way—and they're not a few, given how much I obviously enjoy my own work in the college classroom—graduate studies in religion involve a difficult, demanding, and sometimes dangerous gamble. Going to...

Only now, with my academic term ended and grades submitted, have I gotten around to reading your review of A. N. Williams's The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology (Yale, 2007); thank you for sending it. This does indeed seem a title I should have a look...

As a follow-up to my last post "On the Position of Sin" (17 May 2008), I recommend you give careful thought to the follow passage from Schuon: "Gnosis objectifies sin—error carried into action—by referring it back to its impersonal causes, but subjectifies...

With regard to my post from February 10th of this year concerning a "Restoration to Our Natural State", you ask how I would reply to Saint Augustine when he writes about his Manichaean period: "I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins...

How would I sum up the "essence of Christianity"? And how would I "position" my answer in relation to the two well-known books by that title by Ludwig Feuerbach and Adolph von Harnack? I don't believe I've given ten seconds thought to these authors since my graduate...

Though you didn't actually use the word, I believe you're talking about the subintroductae or agapetae, that is, the consecrated Christian virgins who lived, and sometimes slept, with their male spiritual companions, though without sexual intercourse. There is some...

I'm happy to hear you've worked out a modus vivendi for yourself. I hoped you would not have to break with this community since it was evident from your earlier messages how valuable the friendship of the monks has become to you. In any case, you seem to have learned...