Thomas Merton and Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki

The picture at the right shows the only meeting between two of my interfaith spiritual heroes: Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki. I read my first book by Merton when I was 14 years old, The Seven Storey Mountain, his autobiography. I read my first book by Suzuki when I was 17, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. The same year, I read their only collaboration, Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Over forty years later I reread that collaboration, with the attendant realization that I really did not understand what they were talking about so many years ago. I’m grateful that I have been granted the time to engage them once again.

Their writings were the beginning of a lifelong appreciation of interfaith dialogue, one that I enjoyed professionally in my last years as a clergyman, when I was the Inter-Orthodox, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Director of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Although Orthodoxy is less interested, generally speaking, in interfaith dialogue as opposed to the ecumenical version, I have always preferred the former. For me, it has always been more satisfying to engage someone outside my sphere—from another spiritual galaxy, if you will. Read More

St. Non and St. David of Wales

I once came across a “health video” of a body-builder explaining his secret to the best nutrition. For breakfast he would eat fertilized chicken eggs. He then cracked open the egg to reveal a living, developing chicken fetus. Immediately it began dying. He popped it in his mouth and laughed as he described his delight over the crunching bones. 

I found this horrifying. All I could see was an innocent animal who never even got to take its first breath. The complete disregard for the life of another creature repulsed me. Surely there was something immoral about this. 

It’s hard to tell what causes people to chastise me more: when they find out that I am a vegan or that I am pro-life. Both positions elicit an outpouring of eye-rolling. So I rarely mention these facts in polite conversation. Nonetheless, as an Orthodox Christian my conscience compels me to both. 

There is a long Orthodox tradition of vegetarianism. Consider this 4th-century hymn before meals: 

Far from us that hungering lust that craves a bloody feast, and tears apart the flesh of beasts. Such wild banquets, made from slaughtered flocks, are fit only for barbarians. 

In modern times, St. Paisios criticized modern farming practices for being cruel to animals, and wondered how anyone could eat such meat. While such a position is not mandatory in the Church (which, following the abolition of kosher laws, has shied away from dietary legalism), vegetarianism is preserved as a “counsel of perfection” practiced in monasteries and during seasons of intense prayer. Nonetheless, all Christians are called to love whatever God has made. In the words of Dostoevsky:

Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything.

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This response to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was written in May prior to the conception of Orthodoxy in Dialogue.

Our primary source for the life of St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) comes from Pope St. Gregory the Great (540-604), known in the Orthodox Church as “the Dialogist” for the lives of saints that he composed in the form of dialogues between himself and his deacon. Traditionally we associate St. Gregory with the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, in which he is invoked in the final blessing instead of St. John Chrysostom or St. Basil the Great.

Dialogue Two covers Benedict’s life. Gregory begins with the young Benedict fleeing the sinful distractions of Rome to become a hermit. How young, Gregory does not say. On his way to his eventual destination of Subiaco he performed the miraculous repair of a broken tray, and so found it no less necessary to escape the praise of the pious than the pleasures of the worldly. From a monastery near Subiaco—for there were monasteries all over the Italian peninsula by this time—a monk named Romanus came to clothe Benedict in the monastic habit, and promised to bring provisions to the cave that served as his secret hermitage. Whenever Romanus could sneak away undetected by his abbot he tied some bread and a bell to the end of a rope and lowered it over the edge of the cliff to his young friend. Read More

Father Manoussakis is, as William Desmond puts it in his endorsement of this book, a genuine thinker. By this I mean not merely that one encounters original insights and thought-provoking arguments in his writings, but more broadly that he displays an impressive and steady commitment, throughout the body of his work, to considering whatever subjects he addresses from as many angles as possible—often traversing disciplinary boundaries and subverting commonsense assumptions quite radically in the process. It is not often, after all, that one comes across an author willing to engage figures as diverse as Freud, Kierkegaard, Sophocles, and Maximus at length in the same book—particularly when the book in question is as carefully argued and thoughtfully organized as those by Manoussakis tend to be.

The Ethics of Time is, Manoussakis tells us, “in many ways” a sequel to his God after Metaphysics (2007). What connects these books to one another? At the very least, it seems fair to suggest that the two books share a common thematic basis in Chalcedonian christology. This is not to say that either of these books is christological, or even theological, in a straightforward sense. Manoussakis writes as a phenomenologist, and explicitly denies (at least in God after Metaphysics) that he intends to do otherwise. Even at a strictly philosophical level, however, the incarnation is central to both books. This is because, for Manoussakis (as for Augustine and Maximus), the story of the historical enfleshment of the Logos constitutes not only the crux of salvation history, but also a definitive vindication of creaturely existence over against its cultured Platonic and Manichaean despisers—a vindication replete with “scandalous” philosophical implications. Read More