by Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon Sometimes there is no good news unless you search for it. I found some recently, for instance, when I wondered if college students today are still obliged to purchase and—though I doubt they ever did—read Michael C. Howard’s Contemporary Cultural Anthropology. Well, it seems they aren’t. Howard’s miserable work evidently […]
The Once and Future Darkness
July 19, 2015 By
by Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon From the first page of Holy Writ, the reader is left with no doubt about the nature of the world and humanity’s place within it. These themes are made very plain. Perhaps it is less obvious that a certain polemical concern is active in the mind of the Hebrew author […]
A New Kind Of Death
December 4, 2014 By
by Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon However we are to treat the “necessity” Christ ascribes to his Passion, we should not speak of it as a physical necessity. It was not an mere instance of second law of thermodynamics. Nor—to pose the question theologically—can we say that Jesus had to die in the same sense that […]
Adam, Ralph, Moses and Man
October 11, 2014 By
by Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon Essential to the idea of the Incarnation is what Anscar Vonier called “the assumption that to God mankind is a unity far beyond anything we can conceive.” I will argue, in these reflections, that this unity is biological, psychological, and historical. With respect to biology, perhaps some attention should be […]
The Transgression of Adam
June 18, 2014 By
by St. Symeon the New Theologian HOMILY 1 1. In What Consisted the Transgression of Adam? THE FIRST-CREATED ADAM, being in Paradise, fell, at the instigation of the serpent, into pride; and having dreamed of being a god, as the devil told him, he tasted of the tree from which God had commanded him not […]
Was Adam an Actual or Symbolic Figure, According to the Fathers of the Church?
May 22, 2011 By
From the Orthodox Outlet for Dogmatic Enquiries. There are thousands of patristic references to Adam – an immeasurable chaos. However, it will be hard to locate a verse that refers to Adam in an absolutely univocal manner; i.e., a verse that cannot but imply a specific person. An endeavor like this is a difficult one, […]
