The Beauty of Nature as a Stimulus for Spiritual Enquiry
Protopresbyter Vasileios Kalliakmanis, Professor of the Theological School, A.U.Th. The way of life in large cities has degenerated in recent years. Pollution of the atmosphere, accumulation of garbage, electromagnetic and noise pollution, lack of greenery, the ecological crisis, the commute between home and places of work, traffic congestion as...
On Beauty and God in This Present World
Beauty is underrated and oftentimes misunderstood in the present age. Beauty is God’s way of letting us know that in spite of all of the darkness, in spite of all that is wrong with the world, there is a signal that sanity is somewhere to be found. Beauty emanates from...
The Gift of Iconography: How Beauty Will Save the World
In one of his most famous novels, The Idiot, the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky has the hero of the work, Prince Mishkin, tell the depressed and cynical character Hippolite, “Beauty will save the world.” Prince Mishkin, who, like Dostoevsky, had epilepsy, is a sort of Christ-figure who represents the values Dostoevsky...
Tree Change Dolls – Why We Care
Four days ago, I discovered Tree Change Dolls. When I discovered them, the Facebook page had 23,000+ likes. I checked again at intervals, during the day, and every time, there were about 10,000 more likes. Today, four days later, there are 87,193. Tree Change Dolls are abandoned in thrift stores,...
The Beauty of Orthodox Christian Faith
The Psalmist proclaims: “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him,” (Psalm 96:9). The beauty of holiness, and the awe we experience when standing before God, is evident in the YouTube video embedded above. My kids especially love the latter...
Orthodox Iconography
In this first episode of “Beauty Will Save The World,” with Fr. Barnabas Powell, we learn about the true significance of Orthodox Iconography. The images encountered in our Churches by those outside our Tradition are frequently misunderstood and maligned. Fr. Powell explains in this podcast how our icons actually protect...
Seeing is Becoming: The Mirror of Contemplation in St Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary on the Song of Songs
St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary on the Song of Songs offers a profound contemplative theology in which the category of vision occupies a central place. To see correctly for Gregory involves a process in which exegesis and askesis, a proper interpretation of scriptural images and the purification of the soul’s...
