“The darker the hour, the more faith shines like the sun." #PopeLeoXIV

I visited this church last spring; an incredibly beautiful place

Summary and preview of my chapter on modern Turkish theology in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey:

Great piece that give a clear sense of the experiences of Eastern Orthodox Christians in the contemporary Middle East

That the gate of ijtihad was closed

Sixty-five years ago today, four first-graders desegregated New Orleans's public schools: Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary School, and Leona Tate, Tessie Provost, and Gail Etienne at McDonogh 19 Elementary School. They faced violent mobs and threats to their lives. They were 6 years old. 🗃

My new piece for Balkan Insight. As the #Vatican emerges as a de facto #AI ethicist, the #Orthodox Church has barely engaged. Now, as AI spreads, some Orthodox Primates warn of the "end times" while others are overtaken by algorithms and influencers. balkaninsight.com/2025/11/14/a...

Good statement from the US conference of Catholic Bishops

Absolutely thrilled to be teaching my online course on Orthodox Christian-Muslim Relations again for Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in the spring

Seeing everyone as a brother or sister is part of Christianity, pope says www.usccb.org/news/2025/se...

Another entry in my continuing series, “Integralism is Islamism”: Islamists also claimed this about jihadism It’s true they’re distinct; but they’re definitely philosophically related. The opposite of both is Islamic Modernism (aka religious liberalism)

Today is the feast of St Josaphat, a great saint of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Lithuanian historians today presented Pope Leo with a new book about St Josaphat published by the Church Heritage Museum in Vilnius bpmuziejus.lt/publications...

#WebinAAR | This Friday at 12 PM, the Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit is hosting an AAR webinar on "Religion and Conflict: Case Studies from Ukraine." Register here for free: my.aarweb.org/event-inform... @aarweb.bsky.social @riccardiswartz.bsky.social

How about “entering the gray zone” (as in the below)

This is what I refer to as "STEM Fundamentalism"; basically the idea that all dimensions of human life can and should be placed under the ultimate dominion of scientific and technical knowledge (as religious fundamentalisms argue w/r/t their scripture or religious tradition). It's also not new...

The days of thanking veterans today and forgetting them tomorrow has to come to an end.

"Just as fire burns away wood, so likewise the fear of God burns away tyranny and the passions." A spiritual saying recorded in the oldest surviving Christian manuscript in Arabic (Sinai Ar. 154, ca. 755; ed. Margaret Dunlop Gibson)

Important—and sobering—findings about the state of the discipline and the academy.

it's not that i ever doubted that being a barista was a skilled position, but my year-long effort to try to produce a half-decent latte at home has convinced me that a good barista is easily more skilled than virtually every c-suite executive on the planet

I love it here

Good time to mention that @edinburghup.bsky.social does incredible work, and publishes the premier series on modern Turkey: edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-edinb...

My office and classrooms are in this building tho so I am also in an ivory tower

Most professors aren't in ivory towers. We're in old houses that need lots of maintenance and repairs.

The argument that “political rule must order man to his final goal” is the Islamist argument for a Sharia state (Sharia being the path to Paradise). Not an original point, but the fact that modern theocracies are all just anti-liberalism with different technical terms is fascinating to me.

Post you from a different era. Ca. 2002, around 17 (as an altar boy; the local paper did a story about our church)

“There's an underlying theme here about efficiency & inefficiency,” Senchyne said...": We have to get back to a world where there's room for inefficiency that lets us grow.”

By this time next week, the estimated deaths due to the illegal destruction of USAID and the shuttering of its aid efforts will breach 400,000. More than 260,000 will be children. Source: www.bu.edu/sph/news/art...

Turkish survey results on espionage charges against jailed Istanbul opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu: - Of all respondents across party lines 70% believe he is innocent - Fewer than third of AKP voters believe he's guilty of espionage, while 56% say they're undecided medyascope.tv/2025/11/04/i...

Talking to Americans about Islam is my literal life’s work; I’ve been immersed in American attitudes on Islam for almost 20 years. Mamdani was subjected to some of the worst Islamophobia I’ve ever seen. But his election is also one of the most decisive rejections of Islamophobia I’ve ever seen.

Shi‘i Muslims were one of the main targets of ISIS. ISIS hates literally everything about Mamdani: he’s a multicultural supporter of secular liberal democracy who’s also a heretic in their mind. Mamdani himself is the strongest possible refutation of ISIS.

It is tragically ironic that the (admittedly very well-intentioned) drive to digitize books and library collections laid the foundation for all this. One of my takeaways from the rise of LLMs is that the humanities should never again uncritically adapt themselves to technological change.

Good reason to recommend a great book (that's also open access!): fordhampress.com/the-moralist...

I'm increasingly convinced that the near total lack of traditional monastic spirituality in mainstream American Christianity is a major problem. It is impossible to falsely conceive of empathy as sin if you understand that spirituality isn't only about correct beliefs and actions- its also about..

This is an amazing read, from beginning to end; explains why I’ve found AGI discourse so alarming- it’s like watching the whole world make the literal oldest mistake in the book

Both liberalism and Christianity have everlasting truths, but the people who constitute or call themselves liberals or Christians is ever-changing and re-constituting. Paradoxically, each is both rooted yet also mobile.

I’m not Anglican, but I love quizzes like this so this is me apparently

Every Hoosier of a certain age remembers when Indiana adopted DST in 2006; I hated it; I’ll be mad at DST forever

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

Over 10,000 killed within three days. Pools of blood around a hospital so large they could be seen from space. An absolute nightmare.

Same; the problem is that for the vast majority of people outside North America, the USA is a symbol, not a place

“Starting the conversation” Wonder if he mentions that a panel of some of the most important contemporary Orthodox theologians in the world produced a text on social thought 5 years ago www.goarch.org/social-ethos Also just for anyone interested, below is a list of recs on…

Yet another reminder that secularism is not by itself sufficient for freedom; without liberalism, secularism can be just as tyrannical as any theocracy.

“I think this is the worst place on Earth now,” said Jan Egeland @sg-nrc.bsky.social “It’s the biggest humanitarian emergency on Earth and it happens in the dark, really - there has been far too little attention to what's happening in Sudan."

This is staggering; Turkey has the oldest and most successful LGBT rights movement in the entire Muslim world, and this law would be as oppressive to LGBT people as Russia. It would be one of the most dramatic human rights reversals in recent memory.

Something I genuinely believe is that every encounter you have with another human being is a moral demand sent by God. 99.9% of these are just a few seconds long, and only require basic respect and patience. But others, like neighbors, can be years long and involve daily moral demands. The basic...

*Excellent* point here