Full disclosure: I am a retired CW-3 (Military Intelligence, USAR). I spent most of my time post-9/11 providing intelligence support to warfighters in Afghanistan. It was important work. However, colleagues and friends would be quick to point out that I got hit pretty hard by the good idea fairy myself, most notably in being part of a […]
The Holodomor, Lazarus, and the Rich Man
November 9, 2015 By
Holodomor (dedication and blessing of the Holodomor Memorial in DC). Background info: the Holodomor (i.e. murder by starvation) was an intentional policy of the USSR under Stalin. In 1932-33, the Soviet regime killed upwards of ten million people (the number is disputed, but no one doubts that it was several million) through the forced acquisition of […]
Humanitarianism and Orthodoxy – a theological reflection
June 14, 2015 By
The Problem: the world (and humanity) groans in agony It’s a hard world. It chews people up, divides them, deprives them, hurts them, and does its best to take away their hope. It does its best to demean and dehumanize them. We have all seen this and we are here because we want to do […]
The Illiberal Demand for Kosher and Halal Bacon
April 2, 2015 By
The Joy of BaconWith just a few days left before Pascha, the dominant logismoi distracting me from proper prayer (and analysis) is … bacon. I love it. I especially love the really fatty kind that just melts in your mouth. The best of the best is fried salo, a sort of bacon cut so that it […]
Problems with Talking to the Rider
March 24, 2015 By
In a previous post, I shared the strong finding from psychology that many of our moral decisions are made pre-cognitively (i.e. by the elephant), with the active mind (i.e. the rider) pretending to play the role of objective and pious investigator but actually playing the role of marketing guy for the decision the gut had […]
The Challenge of Post-Hoc Moral Decision Making
March 10, 2015 By
The Rational Decision-makerIn the post-enlightenment west, we have this idea that man is rational; that when he approaches a decision, he gathers the available data, calculates the costs and benefits of each alternative, and selects the one that he determines is most likely to be the best (i.e. expected utility maximization). Very few people […]
The REAL Reason People Leave the Church!
February 24, 2015 By
Google “why people leave the church” and you will get a bazillion links to articles describing why people leave the church (okay, there may be fewer than a bazillion… I stopped counting at a hundred when I ran the search this morning). Put the same query in at Amazon and you will get similar results. In […]
Wolves in the Guise of Prophets: The Problem of Orthodox Fundamentalism
February 4, 2015 By
There is no doubt that fundamentalism is a problem, and Professor Demacopoulos provides a good introduction to it in its Orthodox form. I dare say that the negative reactions to this article will come from two sources: one is the real fundamentalist who doubles down on his pharisaical pride and the second is the conservative […]
The Publican and the Pharisee in Film: Leviathan and The Island
February 4, 2015 By
This is an excellent review. Corruption in politics and the Church is nothing new. Christ is always the remedy, and sometimes he speaks through the witness of the holy fool. Here is my favorite quote from the article; “If Zvyagintsev has the gumption to offer us a vision of what happens when Christians allow themselves […]
You do NOT have to hate the west to be Orthodox!
February 3, 2015 By
The rhetoric from Moscow – to include from the Moscow Patriarchate and its daughter Churches – may be great at gathering support for Putin’s domestic and foreign policy goals, but it is dividing Orthodox Christians in the West and threatens to do serious damage to Orthodoxy’s ability to spread the Gospel here. There is no […]
