This post is a bit off-topic from my normal posts, but since I’m currently looking at some Ph.D. programs that require the GRE, I’m interested in knowing if anyone has any recommendations for study materials.

Thanks!

Contrary to the ease and delight I found in reading Athanasius, I found St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ On God and Christ to be very difficult to get through and had to put the book down numerous times in order to take mental breaks. Although it has been said that Gregory is a prose artist in the original Greek, the English translation loses this appeal and thrusts the work into the realm of virtual incomprehensibility.

The startling discovery was that a reader must read Gregory with the same care that an explosives technician puts into following his recipe for destruction. Just as one wrong combination of ingredients leads to the death of the bomb maker, a normal-paced reading of Gregory leads the reader to intellectual complacency. Without extreme care, the reader finds himself in a vicious circle back where he started having no further understanding of the subject matter than he did before the reading, having only the passage of time to show for the experience.

Even when our mind correctly interprets the puzzle of Gregory’s words, our understanding of the material is still hindered by its contextual ontology. We are faced with the sorry realization that the concepts in Gregory’s time are not the same as concepts in our time and what may seem heretical by our standards were just ways of expressing correct theological interpretations based upon a pre-psychological epistemology. So, even when we finally fully understand Gregory, we don’t. Correct understanding of Gregory seems as simple as trying to swim across a lake of molasses with your hands and feet bound and your waist strapped to either a Yugo or a John Deere tractor, depending on your pre-existent familiarity with early church history.

With all of that being said, I understand that Gregory had a wonderful impact on Christian history and that his writings are works of art in the original language and are difficult to translate for this reason. I believe there is much value in reading Gregory in the translated form however difficult it may be. People do all sorts of bizarre things.

An article refuting many of the claims made by Sam Harris in his books The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reasonand Letter to a Christian Nationcan be found in the latest edition of Biola Connections, the alumni magazine of Biola University. The article, with contributions by Christian scholars Douglas Geivett and William Lane Craig, can be found online here. A pdf of the entire issue can be found here.

A tried and true way to increase traffic to any Web site is through links on other sites. These links typically come through posting content good enough to be linked to. Another method is what is known as reciprocal linking. To put it simply, this is an agreement between two Web sites to link to one another. Traditionally, this increases Google’s estimation of how valuable your content is. After all, if more people who want to share your content with others, it must be valuable.

A bonus in the blogging world is Technorati authority. Each time a new blog links to you, your Technorati authority increases by one. In previous articles I have written about the things you can do, pretty much alone, that will increase traffic. This post relies upon us all working as a team. If you have a Christian blog with a post that you think suits the content of this site and you would like to link to one of my posts in return, please write a post about my content and then use my contact form to let me know about it. In the form, please also include a link to an article on your site that you think both me and my readers will enjoy and I’ll write a post about it. In turn, both of our Technorati authority numbers will increase and Google will like us even more.

Note, though, that this offer is only for content similar to mine. This is an opportunity for Christian bloggers to work together to get our content in front of more eyeballs.