Reading List

After recently posting five times in two weeks, I have returned to a slower pace. To tide you over until I find the time and inspiration to write something new, I'll point you to some things I have been reading.

On his blog, Catholic in the Third Millennium, Dan Dunlap has been writing an interesting and informative series, "The Christological Divide that Anticipated Chalcedon." He explores the theological controversies of the fifth century that led up to Chalcedon's definition of the two natures of Christ.

In The Wall Street Journal Online, Alexandra Alter looks at "the toll one man's virtual marriage is taking on his real one and what researchers are discovering about the surprising power of synthetic identity." The man who is the subject of her article "Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?" spends much of his time in his on-line persona in Second Life, an internet-based virtual world. For a Christian, this article raise questions about the quasi-gnostic implications of technology that allows us increasingly to withdraw from the real, material world and live in an imaginary world.

The theme of the latest issue of AGAIN magazine is "Faith of Our Fathers: The Encounter of Orthodoxy and Anglicanism." Three members of my parish, all former Anglicans, are featured in the issue. Meanwhile, in The New Republic, Jason Zengerle writes about the steady flow of Evangelicals into the Orthodox Church over the past 30 years in his article, "The Iconoclasts." (Rod Dreher mentioned the article on his blog, Crunchy Con, and my friend Colin also forwarded it to me.)

OpinionJournal reprinted "Don Putin," a Wall Street Journal editorial by Garry Kasparov, in which he compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Godfather. Mr. Kasparov is the former world chess champion and a leader of Russia's democratic opposition. I think his analysis and criticism of Putin's corrupt, self-serving rule of Russia is right on target. Given the Moscow Patriarchate's longstanding entanglement with the Soviet/Russian government, I fear it will be hard for the Russian Orthodox Church not to be tainted by this corruption. (Thanks to Stephen for sending me this article.)

I'll leave you with this especially amusing "Pearls Before Swine" strip.