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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners
“Imperfection,” a.k.a. “Perpetual Progress”?
By
Kristina Robb-Dover
Epektasis: it may sound like a venereal disease, but it is actually Latin for “perpetual progress;” and it has been around since the fourth century whenGregory of Nyssa coined the term as a way to explain his understanding of true perfection in the spiritual life. True perfection, for Gregory, consisted not in reaching some elusive, Platonic…
The Gift of Failing
By
Kristina Robb-Dover
Garrison Keillor read this poem by Wendell Berry on yesterday’s “The Writer’s Almanac”: IX. I go by a field where once I cultivated a few poor crops. It is now covered with young trees, for the forest that belongs here has come back and reclaimed its own. And I think of all the effort I have wasted and…
The “Terrible Thing” About Hope
By
Kristina Robb-Dover
The other day I was listening to an NPR interview with the writer Hisham Matar, whose latest novel,Anatomy of a Disappearance, draws from his own experience. Matar’s father, a dissident under the regime of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, mysteriously disappeared while in exile in Egypt more than twenty years ago. It was later discovered that…
Playing Host to Our Demons: Weird Sayings Continued…
By
Kristina Robb-Dover
“When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked…
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