As someone who has now been within the Orthodox tradition for more than a decade, but who got here the long way around; spending a great many years in both academically religious circles as well as post-modern (if not out and out ecumenical/syncretistic) circles, it was fascinating to listen to this interview and hear someone speaking in a way which, 15 years ago, I would have taken in without batting an eyelash and which, now, is completely jarring and difficult to accept at face value as genuinely intended and a perspective arrived at through great effort and achievement. To hear someone who is better familiar with patristics and the scriptures themselves than I am speak of the lessons they teach and the connections between them in the most purely materialistic terms was disorienting. I am grateful for the experience both in terms of what it taught me about myself, as a reminder of progress we can't see when it happens one drop at a time, and also in how much work it is to do the difficult business of engaging without reacting and to experience The Other for who they actually are not who our ego wants to twist them into representing.
As someone who has now been within the Orthodox tradition for more than a decade, but who got here the long way around; spending a great many years in both academically religious circles as well as post-modern (if not out and out ecumenical/syncretistic) circles, it was fascinating to listen to this interview and hear someone speaking in a way which, 15 years ago, I would have taken in without batting an eyelash and which, now, is completely jarring and difficult to accept at face value as genuinely intended and a perspective arrived at through great effort and achievement. To hear someone who is better familiar with patristics and the scriptures themselves than I am speak of the lessons they teach and the connections between them in the most purely materialistic terms was disorienting. I am grateful for the experience both in terms of what it taught me about myself, as a reminder of progress we can't see when it happens one drop at a time, and also in how much work it is to do the difficult business of engaging without reacting and to experience The Other for who they actually are not who our ego wants to twist them into representing.