Sublime

one descended into sin. As Gregory of Nyssa puts this hope for mutability: “Though we are changeable by nature, the Word wants us never to change for the worse; but by constant progress in perfection, we are to make our mutability an aid in our rise to higher things, and so by the very changeability of our nature to establish it immutably in the go

Don’t worry, be happy. As modern people we have chosen Montaigne over Augustine. We traded pious self-cultivation for undemanding self-esteem. But is love of self really enough to be happy? You know the answer to that, dear reader. And so did Augustine.

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We look at every child as a miracle and a fresh creation from God. We rejoice in the passion of a lover as a creation of God. We cherish the love of our family and are reminded all the time that God, as creator and miracle worker, rewards us with all good things—not for anything we have done or not done but because of God’s unavoidable nature of gi

And so as Muslim troops approached from the east on that mighty conquest which would terminate the power of Byzantium in the Galilee, the citizens of that contentious area continued their bitter arguments over the nature of Christ, not realizing that they were engaged in an extension of the same argument that had agitated Makor in the days when the

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

His Letter to the Romans is one of the most remarkable documents of inner struggle ever written. Paul, quite simply, was overwhelmed by guilt. He begins with a problem well known to the Jewish sages: command begets resistance.