Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the ‘last days’ before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they...

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck...

One century’s saint is the next century’s heretic … and one century’s heretic is the next century’s saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.

But why do some people support [the heretics]?” “Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power.” “Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its...

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one...

My body kills me, so I kill it.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?

The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One’s gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind...

There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will...

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the ‘correct opinions about God’ – ‘fundamentalism’ is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry – but not if it means holding faith in the right...

As I ponder my pilgrim’s progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn’t make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn’t the one driving.

The original Christians regarded the deposit of faith, as finally inseparable from the very living substance of the Gospel in the saving event of Christ crucified, risen and glorified, but as once and for all...

The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic...

In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road totheological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of God and the truth of...

What is the basic difference between saying ‘I know that God exists’ and saying ‘I know that love exists’?

It is possible for a Christian to be perfectly orthodox and yet to be defeated, and to be living a defeated and a useless life.

For Christians above all men are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this...

The people who really thirst for life, who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle desperately to distinguish some light in the seated mystery of human existence— these are the...

If I do not feel a sense of joy in God’s creation, if I forget to offer the world back to God with thankfulness, I have advanced very little upon the Way. I have not...

I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it… Let us rejoice in Him in all His fulness and in Him alone.

But first I want you to tell me this: do you know the power of love? Christ passed over all the marvellous works which were to be performed by the apostles and said, “By this...

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, if afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those...

There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing...

Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human...

(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.

…The life of the parents is the only thing that makes good children. Parents should be very patient and ‘saintlike’ to their children. They should truly love their children. And the children will share this...

The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions...

Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus’ day.

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know...

contrary to nature” is a dynamic destruction of death and a triumph for the life of the person.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

Somebody who is Christ’s must love Christ, and when he loves Christ he is delivered from the Devil, from hell and from death.

Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all...

ordinary” persistence in living the humble, consistent life of Christ, not by seeking out extraordinary experiences, especially supernatural ones.

An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.

Once the Church denies her ontological identity– what she really, essentially is as an existential event whereby individual survival is changed into a personal life of love and communion– then from that very moment she...

Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the...

…Love Christ and put nothing before His Love. He is joy, He is life, He is light. Christ is Everything. He is the ultimate desire, He is everything. Everything beautiful is in Christ.

Scripture is our norming norm and tradition is our normed norm and that in a doctrinal controversy Scripture alone has absolute veto power while The Great Tradition (orthodox doctrine) has a vote but not a...

A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today...

The word ‘heresy’ not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word ‘orthodoxy’ not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw...

Everything in this life passes away — only God remains, only He is worth struggling towards. We have a choice: to follow the way of this world, of the society that surrounds us, and thereby...

…This is the way we should see Christ. He is our friend, our brother; He is whatever is good and beautiful. He is everything. Yet, He is still a friend and He shouts it out,...

We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.

I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible...

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.