Lord's Day Reading

Here are some of the things I've been reading today:

Christ and Nothing by David Bentley Hart

For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it alone, in the history of the West, was a rejection of and alternative to nihilism’s despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting façade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.

David Bentley Hart also has a great little book on theodicy called The Doors of the Sea.

And speaking of theodicy, these blog posts by Perry Robinson are a worthwhile read.

Non-conventional psyche and Nameless and out of time from the Second Terrace blog. These are two posts that briefly touch upon an Orthodox demonology. From the first post:

But they are also lustful -- and this is not mentioned all that much, if at all. The signal characteristic of Hades is that the malevolent intelligences are subject to passions without any means by which these passions may be assuaged. In a horrific possibility, it seems that the demonic seeks any human soul to surrender to passion for the entertainment of the spiritual entity. At every act of lust, there is always a voyeur, if not a vicarious participant. That is why rape is always violent, as it is always, always demonic.

I've found that reflecting upon the reality of our immaterial warfare confers a certain sobriety -- a sobriety which is fleeting in a world that either concedes only a token recognition or proffers an unwieldly caricature of the subject.