Does universal salvation negate the sacrifice of the religious martyr?

Martyrdom in a universalist paradigm entails no fear of eternal damnation and is a more credible "witness" before others.

Revealed Knowledge and Authority in the Traditions of Matthew, Thomas, and Judas

Peter's Confession is not merely the origin of ecclesial authority, but the beginning of a hard lesson about how divine insight can coexist with human misunderstanding—and how the Church is built on both.

Married to the Mob II: America Settles?

An opinion piece in Vanity Fair wants to give us rubberneckers—or, you know, trainspotters, depending on which side of the tracks we may be standing (there can be only two, right?)—an apter set of historical precedents to talk about the M.O. of really existing Trumpism over against

On the Need for Incarnational Priors

So long as we take our human experience seriously, anything that is thoroughly arbitrary cannot be genuinely salvific.

For Your Discretion: Unsaying the Subject

It gives me hope in the goodness of humanity to know that, unremarked by policymakers or the press or this digital panopticon in which we all voluntarily inform on ourselves, millions of men and women are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, quietly and durably happy. Every incentive structure leads

Tertium quid nimis: Shoe Drops on Sentinel

"A great master says that his breaking-through is nobler than his emanation, and this is true." ~Meister Eckhart, Sermon 87

'Creatio ex nihilo' cannot be repeated

A brief reflection on Bulgakov and the irrevocability of everything.

Some Reflections on Integral Metaphysics

Metaphysics is not a science in the modern sense, but a mode of knowledge. Yet no conflict is conceivable between the two, nor there can be a symmetrical correlation between them, for their domains are so widely apart.

Can We Ever Be Lost to God?

Insofar as no moment "in time" is lost on God (since God is not bound by time and moments to God do not, as to us, slip away), what happens to those moments wherein one "chooses" God if we are to believe that one could later

A Calque, Ulysses? No, Logos Unbound

The rich will make temples for Śiva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay. —Basavaṇṇa (12th cent.), vācana 820.

Jesus Didn't Kill Himself

At Calvary, Jesus was executed by the earthly powers of his day. "Atonement" cannot be sanitized of this political and historical reality.

An Inconvenient Horizon: Apocalypse Versus the Cult of an Endless Tomorrow

In an age of techno-nationalist optimism, apocalypse is heresy. But only our eschatological horizon can reveal what is ultimately illusory.