May 23Roger Scruton and the Love for HomeWhat allegiance do we owe our homes? Karl Marx famously declared that “the worker has no country”, and argued that patriotism was simply an aspect of the false consciousness that kept the proletariat enslaved in systems of oppression.¹ Their only proper loyalty lay with the international workers’ movement, and to…17 min read17 min read
Feb 2Why the Technological Conquest of Death Won’t Make Us Happy“The mission of the Immortality Institute is to conquer the blight of involuntary death.”¹ It may be the world’s most ambitious mission statement. But it’s a dream attracting many scientists, technologists, and futurists. These transhumanists expect that new scientific breakthroughs will allow technicians to do everything from injecting disease-fighting nanobots…11 min read11 min read
Dec 24, 2022Book Review: Aaron Riches, Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of ChristAaron Riches. Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: 2016. xxi + 279 pp. Ecce Homo offers a fierce resistance against any kind of separatio of the single theandric Christ, especially the modern tendency to divide the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. Although…9 min read9 min read
Dec 22, 2022The Orthodox Consensus at the End of the Sixth Century(A review of the last chapter of Volume 1 in Jaroslav Pelikan’s series on the development of Christian doctrine.) Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. 357 pp. In the…9 min read9 min read
Dec 20, 2022Fellow Workers With God: Free Will and Synergy in Early Eastern ChristianityDue to the towering stature of Augustine in the Latin tradition, grace and free will have been seen in opposition, or at least in significant tension, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles. This was never the case in the East.¹ The early Greek patristic writers universally affirmed that human…9 min read9 min read
Aug 28, 2022I Will Tear Down My Barns: St. Basil on Our Responsibility to the PoorI’ve never plagiarized a sermon before, but today I preached a message (giving due credit!) originally delivered by St. Basil the Great (330–379), theologian, liturgist, monastic reformer, and builder of (most likely) the world’s first hospital. Basil’s text is Jesus’ story, recorded Luke 12:16–21, about the rich farmer who planned…14 min read14 min read
Dec 17, 2021Christian HumanismAn annotated sermon on Psalm 8 — This is an abridged, edited, and footnoted version of a 40-minute message I preached at Tbilisi International Christian Fellowship on September 12, 2021. Annotating a message like this allows me to share some of the deeper theological structure that wouldn’t be helpful to share with one’s congregation during a Sunday…13 min read13 min read
May 27, 2021Seeing Christ in 1 SamuelThe First Book of Samuel contains a gripping collection of stories, crafted by a master narrator (or team of narrators): Hannah crying out for relief from her vicious sister-wife; David silently snipping off the robe of King Saul in the cave; the dramatic night-time visit to the witch of Endor…10 min read10 min read
May 12, 2021International Churches Are a Witness to the KingdomSince 2018, I’ve been pastoring Tbilisi International Christian Fellowship (TICF), an international congregation of around 100 people in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The church began in the early 1990s, soon after the collapse of Communism, as a fellowship for American missionaries. Over the years it has evolved into…13 min read13 min read
May 7, 2021G. K. Chesterton’s Apologetic of the ImaginationNo pen, perhaps, has scrawled more energetically in the defence and exposition of traditional Christianity than that of the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936). His fertile mind expressed itself in a vast range of genres. He contributed a weekly column to The Illustrated London News for thirty years, crafted…12 min read12 min read
