Scott Cairns

I have a confession, which I will make now, and as publically as I can.

I acted, albeit briefly, like a bully this past weekend.

This past weekend, I attended the biennial Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College, where, following three days of...

As I write this, the Western Church is anticipating Easter, and the Eastern Orthodox Church is just now -- with our observance of Lazarus Saturday today and of Palm Sunday tomorrow -- beginning its deliberate descent into Holy Week. After our Palm Sunday service tomorrow, we will savor a Sunday...

Lately, I have felt the need to register my uneasiness about calls for justice, or at least to examine why it is that I am so slow to join the chorus. I suppose I fear that an insistence upon justice-as-sole-concern encourages our becoming comfortable as, well, judges.

Without question,...

On that morning, still stunned and having dismissed my also stunned American literature class at University of Missouri, I made my way to a familiar coffee house, where I met up with my old friend Travis Tamerius, then pastor of a local church.

We greeted one another, expressed our...

On Easter Sunday this year, I was delighted to see that NBC's "60 Minutes" was running an expanded, two-part feature on the monks of Mount Athos, a monastic peninsula in northern Greece that many of us call Agion Oros, the Holy Mountain.

I admit that, at first, I was a...

Belovéds, here's a little something to recognize and to honor the real work yet to be done -- υστερήματα -- for which no one is getting off the hook. The poem is one in a series called "Disciplinary Treatises," which first appeared in my Figures for the Ghost (1994), and...

Christos anesti! Christ is risen!

Today, as I continued preparations for taking a cohort of 30 students and six faculty members to Greece in June, I read through an Athens guidebook, hoping to learn a bit about some of the Athens neighborhoods I don't yet know very well.

As I...

My first experience of Easter services in an Orthodox church was not what I had expected. In the spring of 1997, I had only recently felt the tug toward Eastern Christianity that would culminate in my Chrismation into that body a year and a half later. Before that first Easter,...

A few weeks ago, my friend, Norris Chumley, whose blog is a favorite here on HuffPost, sent me a sneak-preview DVD of his latest project, the result of eight full years of painstaking labor.

Distracted by an array of chores, I didn't get around to screening...

I used to think that the popular notion of synergy came into usage out of a trendy, pop culture, new-age fuzziness. More recently, however, I've noticed how various forms of its Greek antecedent, synergía, crop up throughout the scriptures, from the Septuagint through the epistles. When the word shows up,...

Today, January 6, Orthodox Christians celebrate another of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Christian Church -- the Theophany, or, as it is also called, the Epiphany. It is the day that Jesus is baptized in the River Jordan by the holy prophet and "forerunner" John, the day that Jesus...

My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.
Stay here and watch with Me.
--Matthew 26: 38

During the past dozen years or so, during what I'd like to think are my -- God-willing -- middle years, I have developed a healthy taste for ambiguity.
...

"He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul."
--Psalm 22:3

Among a good many advantages our predecessors in the early Church could claim was a more nearly adequate vocabulary. For instance, they were in possession of a number of words that indicated a number of...

I have many beloved friends, men and women whom, if you were to spend a day with them, you would recognize as genuinely loving people, exceedingly good people. They are, without question, serious, kind, and deeply spiritual folks of one stripe or another. They also share a deep hunger for...

"Then they cried to the Lord in their afflictions,
And He saved them from their distresses;
He sent His Word, and healed them,
And delivered them from their corruptions."
--Psalm 106:19-20

As I have hoped to indicate throughout these sequential blogs -- though surely you must...

How can one believe in a loving God who allows the innocent to suffer? I've been asked this many times, and I've never been quick to answer. Subconsciously, I've probably asked much the same thing in the past.

While I may not frame the matter this way now, it remains...

While it may not seem a purely spiritual practice, I've made a habit of re-reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov every summer for the past 15 years.

Early on, I wasn't sure why this novel held so much power for me; I only knew that it did. It...

Just last week, I and mine observed the Feast of the Transfiguration, one of the Twelve Great Feasts observed by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The feast occurred very near the mid-point of what would otherwise be the two-week long Dormition Fast -- relaxing the fasting rules a bit, and bringing...

The Transfiguration of our Lord is one of the "Twelve Great Feasts" of the Orthodox Church, honoring key events in the life of Christ as well as several key events that led up to and followed his unique life. Each is laden with symbolic beauty and each has been provocative,...

For the past 14 years or so, I have made a practice of saying "the Jesus prayer," which -- give or take a few words -- goes like so: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me."

The prayer is central to a longstanding...