Opinion 196

The last cigarette is never as good as the second to last cigarette.

Opinion 195

On a bumper sticker: "I'm pro life vest and I boat"

Opinion 194

While we're confessing our sins here, I must admit that I've been listening to commercial country music for about the last month.  In many ways its both better and worse than I had feared.

Opinion 193: Alas, alas, aesthetic displeasures!

Things about Orthodoxy which have little to no appeal for me
-Any staretz
-Essence/Energy distinctions
-Head coverings
-Monastic literature
-Patriarchates
-The Jesus prayer
-Prayer ropes
-Beards (though I do own one)
-Living bishops
-Holy Russia
-Small Greek villages


Lord, I'm in trouble.

postscript: And it's been years since I last picked up Schmemann!

Opinion 192: a follow up

Then again, if everything here is more or less true, what else could they do?  The letter is clear and coherent, even reasonable...I get the sneaking feeling that someone who doesn't stand on an eagle while being encouraged to live forever might have been the actual author.

Opinion 191: Adminstration

From the fascinating "headline news" post up at oca.org (entitled, romantically, "Locum Tenens, Administrator, Officers and External Affairs Director meet"):

"...'There was much discussion of a wide variety of issues,' Father Eric added."

Oh thank God.  There was a moment there where I was concerned that, sans discussion of diverse issues, our church could be in trouble!

Opinion 190: Obvious Questions

Heidegger ends Book One, Section 5 with this query:

As existentialia, states-of-mind and understanding characterize the primordial disclosedness of Being-in-the-world.  By way of having a mood, Dasein 'sees' possibilities, in terms of which it is.  In the projective disclosure of such possibilities, it already has a mood in every case.  The projection of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being has been delivered over to the Fact of its thrownnness into the "there".  Has not Dasein's Being become more enigmatical now that we have explicated the existential constitution of the Being of the "there" in the sense of thrown projection?

Yes, Martin, it certainly has.

Opinion 189

"Gay marriage will not undermine traditional marriage, but, God willing, it will subvert 'family values'.  Otherwise, the hell with it."

Found here

Opinion 188: Ah, wretched state of online affairs!

Sloth goeth before a fall - a very slow and relatively relaxing fall.

Opinion 187: There goes Jonah

Oh, our poor little church.

Opinion 186: Independence Day

Well, some two hundred and thirty six years later tea prices are still relatively cheap and I've not had a red-coat unlawfully room and board my house ever once in my life.  Looks like America is still working. 

Opinion 185

Think of it this way: the Orthodox Church is the prodigal son, given to exile and dark, eccentric problems.  This exile is not only a literal experience in Orthodoxy, but a spiritual experience, one that is actually a great tool for expressing who Jesus is in the modern world.  There is an Orthodox intuition of alienation, one that can be transformed into: do you feel alienated?  So do we.  Come worship with us, etc. 


The Catholic Church is the older brother.  It done stayed home and enjoys a routine of logical acts of virtuous household behavior.  It's got its act together  (at least on paper- like all well-organized control freaks, it suffers from odd sexual deviations), yet has managed to abstract itself into categorical absolutes, so that it shudders when it even contemplates the messiness of the younger brother.  But hell, this world needs a bit of hard-headed manditory-ness and one of the reason folks are attracted to this older brother is the conclusion that someone has to speak on the Father's behalf and it's not going to be that brother given to idiotic wanderings, meals with swine and pirogi sales.


Biblical scholars are oblivious to the obvious.

Opinion 184

I've been reading Heidegger's Being and Time for just about a year now.  I'm a little over a third of the way through.  I've come to the conclusion that I do not like anything he has to say.  Instead, as far as I can tell, I just really like the way I feel when I read what he has to say.  All his obtuse sentences take my mind to some bizarre place of abstraction wherein things feel more tangible, and, being tangible, even more stretchy.  Does anyone else know what I mean?

Opinion 183

Sure as hell boring around here these days.