David J Dunn

Hidden Holiness

When you review a book, you are supposed to summarize it, say what you liked about it, then offer some critical commentary. By those standards, this is about to be a terrible review. I have read Fr. Michael Plekon’s Hidden Holiness, and I am utterly, hopelessly in love! I wish I could stick to the formula and offer a level-headed response, but I am just too giddy.

Fr. Plekon is a priest and scholar, with an expertise the “Paris School” – a renaissance in Orthodox theology occurring in and among the emigres who were expelled from Russia after the triumph of the Bolsheviks. Plekon is especially interested in new criteria for saintliness for the modern world (see my summary of his presentation at the 2012 Sophia Institute Conference). For instance, he was a major advocate for the canonization of St. Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris, a woman who ministered the poor, saved Jewish children from the Nazis, and was herself a martyr of the concentration camps. But she was also a controversial figure. She lived in the world and was an outspoken critic of pious religiosity, who could regularly be seen sharing a drink and a cigarette with her poet friends in Paris’ bars. Continue reading “Hidden Holiness”

Re-Thinking Fasting in the Eastern Orthodox Church

Dormition of Mary (via Wikimedia Commons)

We are coming to the end of the Dormition Fast (I talk about this in a Religion Moment). It is a fast, that I must confess, I have not kept well. This is partly due to circumstance, and partly due to my own neglectfulness. Yet I also wonder if fasting itself is not something that the Orthodox Church needs to rethink for the modern, American context. There is something about the “rules” of fasting that do not mesh well with the modern world. Some traditionalists might say that’s exactly the point, and I get it. But I must also point out that strict adherence to the letter of the fasting guidelines may violate its spirit.

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Top Ten Things Every Protestant Should Know About Eastern Orthodoxy

Photo by Jürg Vollmer (via Wikimedia Commons)

The other day a pastor-friend asked me to help him prep for a Sunday School lesson by writing a list of the top ten things every Protestant should know about Eastern Orthodoxy. I thought I would share the list here: Continue reading “Top Ten Things Every Protestant Should Know About Eastern Orthodoxy”

Fun with Adam Smith: Five Things Some May Wish He’d Never Said

A lot of people talk about Adam Smith. Very few have read him. Capitalists uphold Smith for recognizing that people act in an economy out of their own self-interest, but he also said some things about poverty and income inequality that would make doctrinaire market libertarians throw up in their mouths a little. Here are five of my favorites.

#1: Poverty is Relative

“By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensibly necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without” (III.ii.4). Continue reading “Fun with Adam Smith: Five Things Some May Wish He’d Never Said”

“Introducing” Theology of Economy: My Answer to Mark Buchanan

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9, NKJV

12 years long homeless commando... by Lukasz Dunikowski — By Lukasz Dunikowski

In a recent post for Bloomberg.com, Mark Buchanan asks, “Is Economics a Science or a Religion?” It is a good question, but Buchanan is a bit late to the game. He writes that, “The idea of economics as a religion harks back to at least 2001, when economist Robert Nelson published a book on the subject.” Underscore “at least“! That may be the first time an economist asked that question, but academic theologians began asking that question a lot earlier.

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Three Reasons Why Independent Scholarship is Awesome!

There was a piece yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “Who Prepares Humanities Ph.D.’s for a Nonacademic Search?, which reported on findings from a study on how well history graduate students felt they were prepared for life outside academe. Though many of us enter PhD programs with visions of The Dead Poets Society in our heads, after a couple of years we realize that reality is much grimmer. We will not spend our days before wide-eyed pupils and our nights in quiet study and reflection. Rather, we will take out huge student loans to fund our intellectual addictions. We will write dissertations, earn letters behind our names, and get funny caps on our heads. Then, if we are both gifted and lucky, an institution that is doing a search to fill a chair will give us a contract for a year or two. We will take up the task that is given to us with gusto, hoping that if prove ourselves, maybe the institution will award that chair to us. Sometimes that happens, but more often our contract expires and we move on to the next thing and the next thing, wandering like the Hebrew children in the barren wilderness of the academic job market. We may get adjunct work, which pays $2500 per course, on average. So if we taught three courses per semester (which is rare for all but English majors), we would still be below the poverty level. Thus we must rely upon the fading grace and good humor of our spouses to sustain our addiction. Continue reading “Three Reasons Why Independent Scholarship is Awesome!”