Today's starting point:
A Calvinist raises some natural questions about Orthodoxy.
An Orthodox Looks at a Calvinist Looking at Orthodoxy
A Calvinist raises some natural questions about Orthodoxy.
An Orthodox Looks at a Calvinist Looking at Orthodoxy
There is a lot of free stuff here. There are jokes and humor, games, and open source software. But the biggest free attraction is the library of free online books.
The library of free online books includes many different kinds of literature: you can read novels online, or short stories, or poetry, or sermons and spirituality, not to mention other creative works. The literature touches on religion and faith, nature and technology, wit and wisdom, and a lot else besides. This is a place where you can read whole books online, and you are invited to read as much as you like!
About: About the author Jonathan Hayward, and this site, which is his pride and joy. Includes a list of What's New?
Book Store: You are welcome to read as much online as you want, but you might also like to curl up with a hardcover book.
Why not read a little more about The Christmas Tales, A Cord of Seven Strands, Firestorm 2034, Hayward's Unabridged Dictionary, The Sign of the Grail, The Steel Orb, or Yonder?
Et Cetera: A motley collection of art, games, humor, open source software, web services, and other miscellaneous works.
A Library of Free Online Books to Read: This collection includes Eastern Orthodox Christian theology, philosophy, and literature. It is by far the largest section of this website, and possibly the most interesting!
The library collection includes smaller sections of articles, assorted creations, journals, miscellaneous nonfiction, novels, Orthodox humor, Orthodox spirituality, satire, short stories, and Socratic dialogue. If you're looking for a place to explore, why not begin with one of these links?
The Minstrel's Song: The Christian role playing game.
Site Map: A map of this site. Broken down by subject.
The crowning jewel of this site is A Library of Free Online Books to Read. If you're looking for a place to start, why not start there?
A rude awakening
Early in one systematic theology PhD course at Fordham, the text assigned as theology opened by saying, "Theologians are scientists, and they are every bit as much scientists as people in the so-called 'hard sciences' like physics." Not content with this striking claim, the author announced that she was going to use "a term from science," thought experiment, which was never used to mean a Gedanken experiment as in physics, but instead meant: if we have an idea for how a society should run, we have to experimentally try out this thought and live with it for a while, because if we don't, we will never know what would have happened. ("Stick your neck out! What have you got to lose?"—"Your head?") The clumsiness in this use of "a term from science" was on par with saying that you are going to use "an expression from American English", namely rabbit food, and subsequently use "rabbit food" as obviously a term meaning food made mostly from rabbit meat.
In this one article were already two things that were fingernails on a chalkboard to my ears. Empirical sciences are today's prestige disciplines, like philosophy / theology / law in bygone eras, and the claim to be a science seems to inevitably be how to mediate prestige to oneself and one's own discipline. When I had earlier run into claims of, "Anthropologists are scientists, and they are every bit as much scientists as people in the so-called 'hard sciences,' like physics," I had winced because the claim struck me as not only annoying and untrue, but self-demeaning. But it simply had not occurred to me that theologians would make such a claim, and when they did, I was not only shocked but embarassed: why should theology, once acclaimed the queen of scholarly disciplines, now seek prestige by parroting the claim to be every-bit-as-much-a-science-as-the-so-called-"hard-sciences"-like-physics (where "so-called" seemed to always be part of the claim, along with the scare quotes around "hard sciences")? To make my point clearer, I drew what was meant to be a shocking analogy: the claim that theologians are "scientists, and every bit as much as people in the so-called 'hard sciences' like physics" was like trying to defend the dignity of being a woman by saying, "Women are male, and they are just as much male as people who can sire a child."
Read more of "Religion and Science" Is Not Just Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, posted Thursday 28 April, 2009, Ascension.