Santa Maria Antiqua

Thanks to reader Sean for alerting us to Project Santa Maria Antiqua, concerning the study and restoration of a mid VI-century church in Rome, abandoned and sealed in the IX century, and rediscovered a millenia later. 
The mural above captures a theme dear to this blog, as it depicts Christ enthroned, flanked by Greek Saints (on [...]

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On Original Sin and the Immaculate Conception

Not all [modern] Orthodox theologians deny [the Immaculate Conception], though some do very explicitly deny it, thereby illustrating the different development which took place in the West and left the East comparatively unaffected. The development of an explicit doctrine of the Immaculate Conception originated in the Pelagian denial of original sin, which denial forced Latin [...]

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Disintegration and reconciliation

The very problem of Christian reconciliation is not that of a correlation of parallel traditions, but precisely that of the reintegration of a distorted tradition.  The two traditions may seem quite irreconcilable, when they are compared and confronted, as they are at the present.  Yet their differences themselves are, to a great extent, simply the results of disintegration: they [...]

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When theology becomes ideology

… [T]he reading of history that you have taken on from Joseph Farrell, that I think constitutes an ideology, in fact resembles, theoretically and rhetorically, the ideology of those who gave fuel to the Bosnian war. It presents a discourse wherein the West is conceived to have fallen from divine grace, and the chief villain [...]

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Filioquextravaganza

(Apologies for the cheesy title.)
Recently on some of my favorite blogs, there have been some excellent rebuttals to Orthodox contentions about the Filioque clause and the Procession of the Holy Spirit.
First, Sacramentum Vitae’s Dr Michael Liccione (a veteran of irenic, scholarly, substantive online Catholic-Orthodox debate) has added a new installment to an ever-growing series of posts [...]

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B16 on the Problem of Failed Marriages

… including a brief but interesting reference to Eastern Orthodox (and Melkite Greek Catholic) practice. From a transcript of Benedict XVI’s impromptu address to the clergy of the Aosta Diocese on July 25, 2005:
… [Another priest raised the topic of Communion for the faithful who are divorced and remarried. The Holy Father answered him as follows:]
We [...]

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Marriage discipline, East and West

Wan Wei Hsien, over at Torn Notebook, has posted an essay by the late Melkite Archbishop Elias Zoghby on “The Indissolubility of Marriage”, in two parts, here and here.
Also, while we’re at it … I never got the chance to link to some comments on the same sticky issue of Eastern and Western marriage disciplines [...]

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“A Latin’s Lamentation over Gennadios Scholarios”

The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies

“Overcoming the Schism,” Chicago, May 8-10, 1998

THE SCHISM: GROUNDS FOR DIVISION, GROUNDS FOR UNITY
“A LATIN’S LAMENTATION OVER GENNADIOS SCHOLARIOS”
Fr. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem.
In August of 1994, I was happy to be one of the many Latin clerics who over the years, in divisa or in borghese, have [...]

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More on Church Unity and Legitimate Variance

From Wei-Hsein Wan of Torn Notebook, chock full of brilliant quotes from great lights of the Church, both Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary:
Church Unity and Legitimate Variance, Part II: Two Other Voices
For as, in the case of one and the same quantity of water, there is separated from it, not only the residue which is [...]

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Saint Basil on Unity and Legitimate Variance

Our friend Wei-Hsein Wan of Torn Notebook (formerly Bumi Dipijak) has posted a quote from Saint Basil the Great, with commentary, illustrating a certain broadness of mind about doctrinal matters, a legitimate variance and pluralism in theological expression, within a common dogmatic framework (the Nicene Creed, sans Filioque, quoted as such in Dominus Iesus 1):
At [...]

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