At the Corner of Religious Studies, Classics, and Theology

A Perennial Digression is an online magazine dedicated to comparative religion, philosophy, and cultures, ancient and modern, and how the human being and the world together reveal the God from whom they proceed and to which they return.

It is written from a broadly, eclectically Christian point of view, by a liberal Catholic with Anglican and Orthodox sympathies, graduate education in biblical studies and classics, and lifelong love affairs with many other faith traditions, especially Judaism and Hinduism. It is written for inquirers and wrestlers, thinkers and feelers, those seeing visions and dreaming dreams.

What’s With the Title?

As I have clarified here, A Perennial Digression is not “perennialist” in the ordinary sense of that term. I am not a political or cultural conservative or traditionalist, and I am an avowed pluralist, so I do not believe that all religions and cultures secretly teach the same thing. Instead, as a student of comparative religion, mythology, philosophy, and mysticism, I take the view that diverse, embodied, and enculturated human encounters with the sacred converge on a common experience, of a transcendent Unity, Being, Goodness, Truth, Wisdom, Life, and Mind. In my theistic tradition, and in most of the world’s major religious traditions, the word for that ultimate reality is “God,” the infinite source and summit of all being, mind, and life. To know God this way, as this transcendent, ultimate reality, is also to know God as immanently present in, to, and as all things, and so, also, the true source and ultimate end of the human being. In the Christian Tradition, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are the way to make sense of that God-world-humanity relationship. Much of what I do here is explore the implications of those doctrines across multiple subjects, and in conversation with other traditions and their unique languages.

So why the title? It actually started as a joke about my penchant for going off-topic, which is just about the only thing that I could manage to justify keeping a single, consistent blog about.

Please Consider Subscribing

Please consider subscribing of your own good will: $5/month or $30/year, or $50 to be a Founding Member, in which case I will give you special priority in comments and consider requests for special commissions (subject to my discretion). As often as possible, I will post two articles a week—one typically free, one typically behind a paywall. Please also consider subscribing to the YouTube channel: after 1,000 subscribers, I can monetize the videos, which in turn justifies more time spent producing them.

Caveat Lector

Any and all views expressed here are mine, and all views so expressed are either my own or those of my guests, and are in no way affiliated with any institution that I have belonged to past or present. Should they cause offense, my hope is that the reader, not unlike the audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will count them as “[n]o more yielding but a dream” (MSND V.1.419) or, in this case, a digression.