The second chapter of Anestis Keselopoulos’ book on St Gregory Palamas is devoted to what he calls the phenomenology of passions. He quotes from Gregory: ‘We have received the nous [mind] as a leader and self-governing king, but have made it instead the slave of irrational passions. We were honored with reason, but having made it the servant of passions, […]
Read more‘So he drank of the wine and was drunk and naked in his house.’ (Gen 9:21) The story of Noah getting drunk, being observed in his nakedness by his son Ham but having his modesty protected by his other sons Shem and Japeth, and on his return to sobriety cursing Ham’s son Canaan, is hard to fathom. That such a […]
Read moreNews that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, will leave this office at the end of the year to become Master of Magdalene College in Cambridge prompts some reflections. Williams is an intellectual of amazing range and depth. His doctoral thesis on Vladimir Lossky, undertaken at a time when interest in Orthodox thought was in its very early stages in […]
Read moreThe decline of Central Eurasia has been going on for some centuries, but the explanation Christopher Beckwith offers for what he sees as its cultural destruction in the twentieth century is the influence of modernism and its political consequences. ‘The core idea of Modernism is simple, and seems harmless enough by itself: what is modern – new and fashionable – is […]
Read moreThe problem of how to prepare for a potential economic or political collapse of the United States has been exercising members of the legislature of the state of Wyoming, who have been debating the setting up of a task force to deal with the matter. It was initially proposed that it could examine such possible strategies as the state issuing its own currency, raising […]
Read moreThe long expanse of land that runs more or less from the lower Danube in the west to the Yalu River region in the east, known as Central Eurasia, has long been thought of as a backwater in world affairs, but in this arresting study Christopher Beckwith argues for its having been central. Its inhabitants, who often struck the peoples […]
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