When you hear Jesus teach his Gospel message in Matthew 11:27-30, it has all the seeds of a classic spiritual master imparting wisdom to those he loves—just like the Russian Staretsy of old, the great Orthodox Jesus-elders from the nineteenth century—but this is Jesus himself. We hear a loving invitation, one of the most celebrated…
Continue readingA Jesus-Shaped Conscience
“Conscientious Objector.” That epitaph might aptly be placed on the life’s work of Jim Forest (1941-2022), the founder of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and a prolific author. For decades he was a friend and co-laborer of some of the leading voices of Christian conscience in the United States, including Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel…
Continue readingThe Mythology of the “Historical Present”
I should not take exception, I suppose, if critics occasionally question my choice to render all Greek present tense verbs as English present tense verbs in my recent translation of the New Testament. The same choice was made, as it happens, by Tyndale and by his successors on the committee of scholars who produced the…
Continue reading