About

Theophaneia: Dispatches from the Eighth Clime is an eclectic blog oriented to the creative retrieval of Christian tradition understood as revealed truth expressed in Hebraic-Platonic idiom and insured by the light of illumined reason.

Our essays draw on the best in modern philosophy and theology in dialogue with other branches of Abrahamic revelation; with Indic, Sinitic, and Tibetan paths of realization; and with primordial and indigenous initiatic wisdom practices as disclosed through metaphysics, mystical theology, poetry, symbolism, myth, art, music, and beyond. The God’s-eye view that implicitly masquerades as a view from nowhere after it purports to have stormed heaven itself, to which we have become paradoxically too familiarized without ever knowing what it is—like fish in water—can be critiqued in a way that avoids the rocky crags of destruction and the siren song of construction only by our throwing the three into relief from many particularly embedded vantage points.

In homage to such recent—and by recent, we mean on the cusp of the déluge now proceeding to engulf our world order—luminaries of intensive reflection on the transcendent realm of divine ideas and its instantiation at the level of imagination as the animating core of personal and communal life as Alexander Golitzin, André Scrima, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Henry Corbin, Eric Voegelin, Gershom Scholem, A. K. Coomaraswamy, Mircea Eliade, Georges Dumézil, Pitirim Sorokin, Namkhai Norbu, Herman Dooyeweerd, Simone Weil, George Grant, Ostad Elahi, C.S. Lewis, Franz von Baader, Warren Felt Evans, Emanuel Swedenborg, Richard Hooker, and myriad ancient, patristic and medieval sources of inspiration, we have placed Theophaneia under the patronage of Holy Wisdom. Our logo is a tribute to the Burning Bush (Rugul Aprins) Group of hesychasts and to our Blessed Lady the Theotokos. God remember the reader.

Please visit our YouTube channel or browse this Christian Platonism Reading List to help get your bearings with some resources for our core area of inquiry.

We publish essays from a diverse set of writers and thinkers around the world. If you wish to participate in some way, whether by submitting a piece, attending an online study group or discussion, or making a modest donation to help us cover our operating expenses, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Warm regards from our company of wayfarers in occidental exile.

To contact us, use Facebook, X, or email.

Team

Brian Christopher Harris | Editor-in-chief

Brian is a high school history teacher who holds an M.Ed. from UMass Boston, a certificate in Waldorf high school teaching, and an M.Div. from St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, with a certificate in Eastern Christian Studies from the Sheptytsky Institute. His studies have ranged across the philosophical, theological, and mystical traditions of several civilizations, with particular interests in Platonism in its Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Christian developments; Islamic philosophy; Sufism and Shiʿi ʿirfān; and Kabbalah and Hasidic thought.

His principal intellectual interests lie in metaphysics, the reception and transformation of Platonism in the Islamic intellectual world, maʿrifa and contemplative practice, and the relationship of philosophical reasoning to revelation, spiritual interpretation, and the knowledge of God. More broadly, he has studied classical and medieval philosophy across Platonic, Islamicate, Christian Scholastic, and Indo-Tibetan traditions, together with the writings and practices of the great contemplative traditions.

Outside his academic work, Brian has spent more than a decade immersed in traditions of unaccompanied folk song from France, the British Isles, and elsewhere. He is a longtime participant in Sacred Harp singing and related forms of hymnody and, having studied Byzantine chant, has taken up the study of the daf and the Kurdish tanbour. He also writes poetry.

Nick Freiling | Managing Editor

Nick Freiling is an entrepreneur and father of five. He spends most of his time building startup brands, fishing Florida intracoastal waterways, and reading books.