In Defense of Origen and Christian Universalism

“When people dismiss early Christian universalism as an aberration in Christian theology, dreamed up by Origen in the third century under the influence of paganism and later discerned to be heretical they err on several counts. First, they fail to appreciate that Origen’s theology of apokatastasis was primarily a synthesis of much earlier Christian ideas, […]

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The Elevation of the Individual In the Christian Story

The following is an excerpt from Erich Auerbach’s 1929 publication, Dante: Poet of the Secular World – ‘The story of Christ is more than the parousia of the logos, more than the manifestation of the idea. In it the idea is subjected to the problematic character and desperate injustice of earthly happening. Considered in itself […]

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A Brief Meditation on Revelation 14:11

“And the smoke of their torment rises for ages of ages” – Revelation of John 14:11; The New Testament: A Translation, David Bentley Hart The smoke of the torment of the damned is the incense of their righteousness. So this smoke will ascend to the presence of God forever and ever; so, that this offering […]

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And then – the glory…

In what is my estimation, John Steinbeck’s finest novel East of Eden, he moves in and out of a sermonic discourse that thunders from another place where beauty dances in the human heart and speaks to the kind of experience that shatters the dim world we so often feel confined to: Sometimes a kind of glory […]

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Jason Micheli Answers a Common Evangelical Objection to Universalism

For those of us, myself included who retain ties to evangelicalism in some way (I would say I am evangelicalish of a small c- catholic variety), have to overcome some serious obstacles to embrace an orthodox understanding of Christian Universalism. Micheli, a Methodist minister, and host of the excellent podcast Crackers and Grape Juice, where […]

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Meeting the Consuming Fire of God

Fr. Kimel has a great reflection on George MacDonald’s famous (unspoken) sermon The Consuming Fire. This post is well worth the read.

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Mount San Jacinto

Come now child, here now child, You with the clear eyes We will leave this valley floor and Ascend San Jacinto’s snowy heights Rising rose in twilight’s blushing glance.   They say this peak was named for a boy Who defied an emperor and dying, deified – Joined the empyrean company clothed In the same […]

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David Bentley Hart on the Prodigal Gift of Being

  The following is an excerpt from “The Offering of Names”, first entry in Hart’s recently released collection of essays,  The Hidden and the Manafest – Essays in Theology and Metaphysics: Every metaphysics, simply said, that does not grasp (or at least adumbrate) the analogy of being is a tower of Babel, attempting to mount up […]

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Yeats’ Haunting Vision – The Second Coming

There are few poems in the English language as bone-chilling as WB Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. This year marks the century anniversary of a poem that captivated and terrified the modern world. One needn’t be familiar with Yeats’ Irish nationalism, Theosophical inclinations, or his occultism to gain entrance into his imagistic rendering of the collapse […]

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