Christian Reading, The Strand, and a Toast to the Inklings

by Erin Doom

Feast of the Holy Protection of the Theotokos

Anno Domini 2020, October 29

As you read through today’s issue of Microsynaxis, if you are encouraged, challenged, enlightened, or find any value whatsoever in this labor of love, please consider joining the community of Eighth Day Members at any level.

1. Bible & Fathers: “Christian Reading as a Means of Enlightenment” by Abbot Herman

Thursday – Feast of St Anastasia the Martyr of Rome: Col. 1:24-29; 2:1. Lk. 11:14-23. Online here.

Friday - Feast of Cleopas & Artemas of the 70 Apostles: Col. 2:1-7. Lk. 11:23-26. Online here.

Saturday - Feast of the Holy Martyr Epimachus of Egypt: Rom. 16:1-16. Lk. 8:16-21. Online here.

Sunday - Feast of SS. Cosmas & Damian the Holy Unmercenaries of Asia, and Their Mother Theodota: 1 Cor. 12:27-31; 13:1-8. Lk. 16:19-31. Online here.

Here are the opening lines to a great (and short) piece on the need for “Christian reading” in an age in which the “purpose of spirituality has become earth-oriented, pragmatic, egotistic, and thus insensitive to the eternal reality that surrounds man: nature, the universe, and God, Whose image has become dim in the sight of modern man.”

When it comes down to the very basics, it seems that the essential problem of present-day Christianity is the weakness of Orthodox witness and lack of adequate Enlightenment, i.e., religious education and evangelization with the knowledge that God has become incarnate in humanity and now for 2,000 years has manifested divinity in men—active, vibrant, and dazzling with Uncreated Light. And this is straight up to our century and even our time. The documentation of Acts and the distribution of writings among all nations has since Apostolic times resulted in the phenomenon of Christian literature. In the course of time and under various influences this has developed into diversified forms of modern literature, which nowadays, alas, is hostile to its very initiative and its holy calling. The “Gutenberg” printing press is working against its original purpose—to bring Christ’s Enlightenment to the fallen world.

Read the whole thing here.

2. Books & Culture: "Many Worlds: The Strand or Eighth Day Books?"

The owner of The Strand, a famous 93-year-old bookstore (also the largest one in NYC), recently tweeted out a plea for help from customers because their 2019-2020 year-to-year revenue is down 70%. Douglas Murray offers a unique perspective, pondering whether the demise of The Strand might not be such a bad thing. According to Murray,

The book trade in America is badly screwed up, as it is everywhere. In part this is because many publishing houses seem to think that their role is not to give the public the books they want, but rather the books the publishing houses think they would be best instructed by. It is the nature of the publishing industry, and the way it hires, that the viewpoint diversity in the sector is narrow, blinkered, and parochial.

That same viewpoint is now replicated on the frontline. Increasingly bookstores are places where customer are force-fed books that the store’s employees think will be good for them. In recent months in particular bookstores in the US have decided that if they push certain products on the public hard enough then all those who work there will be doing their bit to defeat white supremacy / embedded racism / patriarchy / cisheteronormativity / Donald Trump and more. The joy of bookshops used to be that they offered an opportunity for the reader to open their mind up to many worlds. Today many bookstores seem to think that their role is to force-feed their customers with only one view of the world: one that the retailers honestly seem to believe is the only worldview a literate or thinking person could possibly have.

The Strand has become among the worst offenders.

While both Eighth Day Books and Eighth Day Institute are definitely committed to peddling the early Christian Fathers and books that shed light on ultimate questions in an excellent way, we are also committed to offering opportunities for you to not only open your mind up to many worlds, but also to engage in authentic dialogues of love and truth. So instead of supporting The Strand, consider supporting the Eighth Day enterprise: get your books from Eighth Day Books AND join the community with an Eighth Day membership.

And you can read Murray’s whole piece on the Strand here.

3. Essays et al: “Myth Made Fact: A Toast to the Inklings as Spell Breakers” by Richard Rohlin

Last year at the 2019 Inklings Walking Tour, Richard Rohlin offered a toast at each of the three microbreweries we visited. The concluding toast reflected on the famous conversion of C. S. Lewis on Addison’s Walk which went into the wee hours of the night (4 am, to be precise). The next day, Lewis described the evening in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves. Here’s a small excerpt from that letter, included in Rohlin's toast, which discusses the writings of William Morris and George MacDonald:

These hauntingly beautiful lands [of Morris's fiction] which somehow never satisfy—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The MacDonald conception of death—or, to speak more correctly, St Paul’s—is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you . . . to go further.

Read the whole toast here.

Finally, don’t forget, if you’ve been encouraged, challenged, enlightened, or found any value whatsoever in my labor of love through Microsynaxis (or any of the other many EDI endeavors), please do consider supporting the work of renewing culture by joining the community of Eighth Day Members. Among many other perks, you’ll begin receiving the weekly member’s issue of Synaxis, which this coming weekend will include, among several other pieces:

Rohlin’s Inklings Lecture: “Saving the Shire: Ascetic Renunciation and Love of Home in the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings”
All three of Rohlin’s Inklings Toasts: “Visions of Paradise”
Plus the second part of Fr. Gabriel Rochelle’s presentation on David Jones: “Love of Home for David Jones and for Us”

Thanks for considering!

In Christ,

Erin John

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What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 31, 2026

"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 24, 2026

"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

Christian Reading, The Strand, and a Toast to the Inklings

by Erin Doom

Feast of the Holy Protection of the Theotokos

Anno Domini 2020, October 29

What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

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What is Given and Given Up

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