Last year, my Lenten series looked at the wisdom recorded in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. One of the figures we briefly met there was a certain Abba Moses, better known in hagiographical history as St. Moses the Ethiopian, St. Moses the Abyssinian, or St. Moses the Black. From these cringe epithets, you can … Continue reading St. Moses and the Way of Faithfulness amidst Prejudice
Of all the things that make optimism hard to find in our current social and political climate, one of the ones that I find most concerning is the lack of civility, grace, and curiosity in public discourse. Everything is attacks, knee-jerk responses, and assuming the worst possible motives — for one’s allies as much as … Continue reading St. Peter Faber and the Way of Dialogue
Of all the Saints of the Church, few have had a bigger role in my how I understand Christianity and the world than St. Gregory Palamas, a fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian who rose to prominence through his defense of a monastic practice known as hesychasm (’stillness’). The debate around hesychasm was complicated, but to make a … Continue reading St. Gregory Palamas and the Way of Light
There are a lot of watershed moments in history, moments that mark a decisive ‘before’ and ‘after’. We might think of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, for example, which precipitated the First World War and everything that happened as a result of it, or the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The … Continue reading St. John XXIII and the Way of Open-Heartedness
There are few symbols more evocative in the Biblical imagination than the desert, or wilderness. Such stories as the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness for forty years, the exile across the barren lands of the Syrian Desert, and Jesus’ forty-day battle of will and wit with Satan have gained an archetypal status in the tradition. … Continue reading St. Anthony the Great and the Way of the Desert: A Reflection on Luke 4:1-13
Matthew Root 