Eighth Day Institute

It's that time of year again when you have the opportunity to support organizations you believe in. If you appreciate the mission of Eighth Day Institute - renewing culture through faith & learning - and have experienced "conversations you can't have anywhere else" at our events, please consider offering a year-end Christmas donation at https://app.donorview.com/561KN . Thank you for your support!

Eighth Day Institute Our mission is to renew culture by facilitating a dialogue of love and truth that connects people to

If you live anywhere near Wichita, you do not want to miss our 9th annual Inklings Festival this weekend. Get all the details and register at https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/inklings-festival We'll be celebrating Dorothy Sayers and as an introduction, you should read C. S. Lewis's "Panegryic on Dorothy Sayers."

A Panegyric for Dorothy Sayers Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

Here's a flyer with the full schedule for the Inklings Festival this weekend. You can also download a copy from our website at https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/inklings-festival And we'll have print copies available at the festival. Hope you can join us for a beautiful and excellent weekend as we celebrate literature, craftsmanship, & 35 years of Eighth Day Books. We promise you experience "conversations you can't have anywhere else!"

See below for a list of books recommended by Dorothy Sayers back in 1940 in her book "Begin Here: A War-Time Essay. The books fall into six categories: 1) The disintegrated state of mind the world has got into; 2) About Germany; 3) The difficulties of international understanding; 4) About the British Empire; 5) About Science; and 6) About the Christian view of things.

Some Books to Read Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

Great news for our summer campaign: I met with a long-time supporter this morning who will match every single dollar you donate until we reach our goal! Many thanks to this generous supporter!

Between those matching dollars and the eight kind supporters who donated over $1000 yesterday, we only need another $2,575 to reach our goal of $15,500.

Please take a moment today to show your support of Eighth Day Institute with a donation of any amount at https://app.donorview.com/lAbKm

Every single dollar counts, especially now that EVERY SINGLE ONE will be DOUBLED. So whether you can offer $1000 or $1, seize the day and d0nate today.
​​​​​​​
In Christ,
Erin “John” Doom
Founder & Director, Eighth Day Institute

We couldn't do it without you!

Eighth Day Institute Our mission is to renew culture by facilitating a dialogue of love and truth that connects people to

Here's an excerpt from the second of two pieces we're offering for today's Feast of the Dormition, this one by St Gregory Palamas:

In ancient times there were many who attained to divine favor, glory, and power. As David says, “How precious also are thy friends unto me, O God! How great is their authority! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand” (Ps. 139:17-18 Lxx). According to Solomon, “Many have acquired riches, and many daughters have acted with power, but she excels and outdoes them all,” to an expression of degree (cf. Prov. 31:29). Standing between God and the whole human race, she alone made God a son of man, and men sons of God, rendered the earth heaven and made mankind divine. She alone among women was declared the Mother of God by nature transcending every nature. ... // Today she has moved from earth to heaven, and now has heaven too as a fitting dwelling-place, a palace meet for her. She has stood on the right hand of the King of all, clothed in vesture wrought with gold, and arrayed in divers colors, as the psalmist and prophet says of her (cf. Ps. 45:9 Lxx); and you should take this garment interwoven with gold to mean her divinely radiant body, adorned with every type of virtue. For at present she is the only one who has a place in heaven with her divinely glorified body in the company of her Son. Earth, the grave and death could not ultimately detain her life-giving body, which has held God and been a more beloved habitation for Him than heaven and the heaven of heavens. For if a soul which has the grace of God dwelling within it goes up to heaven when released from this world, as we believe and is evident on many accounts, how can that body which not only received within it the pre-eternal, only-begotten Son of God, the ever-flowing fount of grace, but was also plainly seen to bear Him, fail to be taken up from earth to heaven? Could she who, when only three years old, before the heavenly child had dwelt within her and been clothed by her in flesh, lived in the Holy of Holies, and who became excellent and truly heavenly even in her body through many great works, afterwards become earth subject to corruption? How could this seem reasonable to people who take a rational view?

On the Most Venerable Dormition of our Exceedingly Pure Lady, Mother of God and Ever Virgin Mary Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

Here's an excerpt from the first of two pieces we're offering for today's Feast of the Dormition, this one by Hans Urs von Balthasar:

Jewish thought constituted a preparation for the Incarnation insofar as (unlike Greek thought) it always saw man as a unity of body and soul; it never pursued a one-sidedly spiritualized ascetical ideal or envisaged an immortality of the soul apart from the body. This mode of thought, which is not only biblical but does justice to the nature of man as he is, facilitates our approach to this most mysterious union between God and man that took place in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This human womb was exclusively prepared to allow God’s seed to develop in it without any hindrance; it was like a subterranean mine whence the Son of God could draw all He needed to equip Himself fully as a God-bearing man. // What, therefore, is the Church celebrating today? That a simple human body, inseparably united to its soul, is capable of being the perfect response to God’s challenge and of uttering the unreserved “Yes” to His request. … So we are celebrating a feast of hope; but, like all the New Testament feasts, it is celebrated on the basis of a fulfillment that has already taken place; that is, not only has the Son of God been resurrected bodily—which, in view of His life and death, is quite natural—but also has the body that made Him man, the earthly realm that proved ready to receive God and that remains inseparable from Christ’s body. Today we see that this earth was capable of carrying and bringing to birth the infinite fruit that had been implanted in her. Today we celebrate the ultimate affirmation and confirmation of the earth.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Bodily Faith Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

For today's Leavetaking of the Feast of the Transfiguration and the Feast of St Maximos the Confessor, here's a short sample from today's posting on the Transfiguration by St. Maximos (from his 200 Chapters on Theology):

"For the Lord does not always appear with glory to all who are standing with Him, but rather, He is near the beginners in the shape of a servant (cf. Phil. 2:7), whereas He appears in the shape of God to those who are able to follow Him when He ascends the highest mountain peak of His transfiguration (cf. Mt. 17:1-8), in which shape He was before the existence of the world. It is possible, therefore, that the same Lord does not appear in the same way to all who happen to be with Him; rather, to some He appears in one way, and to others in a different way; in accordance with the measure of the faith in each, clearly He varies the vision."

Transfiguration: The Highest Mountain Peak Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

East and West celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration on August 6. Here's an excerpt from St Proclus' homily on the transfiguration: "Come to that wisest of good guides and let us follow Luke once more to behold Christ going up the high mountain, taking with Him Peter, James and John as witnesses of the divine transfiguration. For it says that the Master took Peter and his companions and ascended a high mountain on which Moses and Elijah conversed with Christ; a high mountain on which the Law and the Prophets conversed with Grace; a high mountain on which Moses sacrificed the paschal lamb and sprinkled the doorposts of the Hebrews with its blood; a high mountain on which Elijah dismembered the ox with those others and consumed the sacrifice with fire passing through the water; a high mountain on which Moses stood who opened and closed the waters of the Red Sea; a high mountain where Elijah stood who opened and shut the clouds of rain; a high mountain so that Peter, James and John might learn that He was the one “to whom every knee shall bend, in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld.” ~St Proclus, On the Transfiguration

On the Transfiguration Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

Last evening at the Hall of Men I presented St. Mark of Ephesus (d. 1522), the "Pillar of Orthodoxy."

We have several traditions at the Hall of Men. One of them is to ask the presenter what his hero would say to us about cultural renewal. I offered two answers, both taken from St. Mark's writings. One of them was a simple admonition to pray, and specifically to pray the Jesus Prayer. The words I read from St. Mark come from the opening paragraphs of a short text in the fifth volume of the Philokalia: "On the Words of the Divine Prayer "Lord Jesus Christ Have Mercy on Me." You can read that passage here: https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/on-the-words-of-the-divine-jesus-prayer

I share this as a way to encourage you to recommit yourself to prayer. Our families, our cities, our country, and our culture need it more than ever.

But I also want to ask you to pray for Eighth Day Institute. Monthly support has dropped 37% since this time last year. Tack on the unplanned expenses related to our event/fundraising/email platform being bought out (almost $10,000!) and this is right on the edge of being catastrophic for us.

We need to raise $15,500 to keep operations afloat until Giving Tuesday. We've already received $2,525.

Please do pray for us. And please consider offering a SPECIAL ONE-TIME DONATION TODAY at https://app.donorview.com/lAbKm

If you are not a monthly member or if your monthly membership has expired, please do consider BECOMING A MONTHLY MEMBER TODAY at https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/membership

Thank you so much for your prayers. And thank you for your support.

In Christ,
Erin “John” Doom
Founder & Director, Eighth Day Institute

On the Words of the Divine Jesus Prayer Eighth Day Institute is a Christian non-profit devoted to creating resources to help people renew their city as well as their soul.

JULY NEWS, NOTES, & PUBLIC MICROSYNAXIS:
Many thanks to Daniel Brake, our local friend, former board member, and long-time Eighth Day Member who has finished editing all of our digital content from the 2023 Symposium on the theme "Fear Not!" I'll get those Symposium videos added to the Digital Library on our website next week and then will send out an email to all Eighth Day Members with a reminder about the access code (so you don't have to dig around looking for it!).

In the meantime, be sure to register for the 2023 Symposium on the theme "Attend To Thyself: Attentiveness and Digital Culture" (Jan 10-13): https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/copy-of-eighth-day-symposium-2024 Last month I featured content in this newsletter from Ken Myers, the Protestant speaker. Below, you'll find content from our Orthodox speaker, Athonite monk Fr. Maximos Constas (excerpts from a paper he presented, which provoked our theme and gave us our title).

You'll also find content below related to our upcoming Inklings Festival on October 20-22. This year we'll be highlighting the work of Dorothy Sayers. Be sure to take advantage of early rate registration here: https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/inklings-festival

And just so that it's on your radar, please do mark your calendars for the 2024 Ad Fontes Academic Week on June 5-8. The theme is "Wider than the Heavens: Patristic Views on Mary." I've also provided below a short piece pertinent to this event theme.

As you are probably realizing, the content for this revised monthly newsletter—News, Notes, and Public Microsynaxis—will be focused primarily on the themes of our three main events (Inklings Festival, Symposium, Ad Fontes). I'm currently working on our website, which will also soon reflect this focus.

Finally, if you are not an Eighth Day Member, please do consider joining the community of members who sustain our work: https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/membership Resources are extremely tight right now and we depend upon generous folks like you to keep the doors open so we can continue organizing events where you are guaranteed to have "conversations you can't have anywhere else." Become a member today!

And if you are already a member, please do consider offering a special one-time donation: https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/membership Every little bit matters immensely these days!

Now dig in!

And cheers to the renewal of culture through faith & learning!

In Christ,
Erin “John” Doom
Founder & Director, Eighth Day Institute

PATRISTIC WORD
Just a little over a week ago, the Church celebrated the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. This feast comes at the conclusion of the Apostles' Fast which runs from the day after the Sunday of All Saints—the Sunday after Pentecost—until the feast day on June 29 (the following day, June 30, is the Synaxis of the Holy Apostles).

For this Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the Pappas Patristic Institute emailed a link to an original translation of a homily by St John Chrysostom (d. A.D. 407): “On the Holy Apostles Peter & Paul.” Here’s a brief excerpt praising each of them:

Paul: the mouth of Christ, the harp of the Spirit, and the man who at three cubits tall touched heaven! Being circumscribed in place, he encircled all the world for the Master. From Jerusalem round about as far as Illyricum he filled it with the Gospel of Christ. He was a swift-traveling runner, an eagle soaring into heaven, filled with divine grace, called by the Lord to bear his name before the whole world. Passing through the third heaven, he entered into paradise, ascending even as far as the incomprehensible throne of the Lord and hearing mysteries that cannot be uttered, of which it is not permitted a man to speak.

And what shall I say with respect to Peter? He is the sweet vision of the Church, the shining splendor of the world, the most-pure dove, the leader of the apostles. He is the ardent apostle, seething with the Spirit. He is angel and man, filled with the grace of God; the firm rock of the faith; the mature mind of the Church; the one who was called “blessed” and “son of dove” [Bar Jonah] by the very mouth of the Lord on account of his purity, and who received the keys of the kingdom of heavens from the Lord Himself.

Here’s a link to a PDF of the full piece:https://43e0a100-ec26-4541-811a-c59911a3353b.filesusr.com/ugd/38f972_6523fc5cc1754fba892f11cdb391783d.pdf

And for those who want to learn more about this feast day, here’s a link to a short and informative article: http://ww1.antiochian.org/fast-and-feast-saints-peter-and-paul

You can also read the opening paragraph of a homily by St. Gregory Palamas for this same feast day at the following link (I've read it more than once at the Hall of Men as a defense for our format of praising heroes): https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/on-the-feast-of-ss-peter-paul-leaders-of-the-apostles

MEMBERS' MICROSYNAXIS
The most recent issue of our Members’ Microsynaxis focused on the work of Arthur Boers, particularly two of his books: Living into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions (2012) and The Way Is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (2007). Here’s the opening paragraphs from some bonus material I’ve posted on our website from Boers’ book Living into Focus (this wasn’t included in Members’ Microsynaxis):

Today, many challenges and a good deal of our uneasiness have to do with how we relate to and rely on technology. But what is technology? Edward Tenner matter-of-factly describes technology as “modification of the natural world.”

You and I use technology every day. Even when I try to “get back to the basics” and head to the wilderness, I am immersed in it. Gear and clothes—often surprisingly fancy and expensive—are crucial. I carry insect repellant, sun screen, ibuprofen, and binoculars to enhance both my journey and my comfort. I have a life jacket for safety, a Gore-Tex hat for shade from sun and protection from rain and to retain body heat in the cold, and a nifty water bottle to prevent dehydration. Canoes too are amazingly sophisticated and technological, both in the design and in the materials used in their construction. I like Kevlar canoes, not because I am fascinated with high-tech material, but because they are light and easier to carry on demanding portages. In the wilderness, we are more aware of how vulnerable we are and how crucial proper equipment is for both comfort and safety. Without exaggeration, the right technology can make the difference between life and death.

Make no mistake: we need technology. There is no human culture or civilization without it. Cooking, growing food, clothing, and playing music all involve technology.

Sometimes our understanding of specific forms of technology evolves. Trains adversely affected natives and natural regions out West in the United States and Canada. But now many locals are train aficionados. Alain Botton reminds us that though windmills were once loathed (condemned for theological and aesthetic reasons), they eventually became a cherished part of Dutch heritage—not just on postcards but even celebrated in great works of art, especially Golden Age painters.

Nevertheless, the impact of technology on our lives warrants careful consideration. It is easy to find ourselves in the predicament Martin Luther King Jr. long ago described: “We have allowed our technology to outrun our theology.” We’re not so good at carefully weighing the price of technological progress.
Read the whole excerpt on "Becoming ALERT" here: https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/becoming-alert

INKLINGS FESTIVAL
I recently began reading "Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories" by Dorothy Sayers. Honestly, it's my first real venture into detective stories and I'm thoroughly enjoying them. One of those stories gave me an idea for a fun challenge for you but I've run out of time this evening to pull it off. So I'll make that a separate stand-alone email (and Facebook post) sometime in the coming weeks. And in the meantime, let me just encourage you to read, or re-read (and re-re-read!), one of the most famous pieces by Sayers for anybody and everybody involved in or interested in classical education: "The Lost Tools of Learning." Classical education is one of the threefold focuses of our 2023 Inklings Lectures by Lesley-Anne Dyer: "Dorothy L. Sayers: Advertising, Murder, and Classical Education."

Here's a sampling from the "Lost Tools" piece to whet your appetite (it's amazing how increasingly relevant this becomes every single day!):

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee-meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them?

Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding?

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly and properly documented, and one that is to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?

[…]

Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play The Harmonious Blacksmith upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorised The Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle The Last Rose of Summer. Why do I say, “As though”? In certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely this—requiring a child to “express himself ” in paint before we teach him how to handle the colours and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe—it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economise labour and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to “give himself the feel of the tool.”

Let us now look at the mediæval scheme of education—the syllabus of the schools.

Read a PDF of the whole piece athttps://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfLearning-DorothySayers.pdf Please do read and re-read it!!! And don't forget to register for the Festival: https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/inklings-festival

EIGHTH DAY SYMPOSIUM
As I've already mentioned, this year's Symposium theme is taken directly from the title of a paper written by our keynote Orthodox speaker, Fr. Maximos Constas: "Attend To Thyself: Attentiveness and Digital Culture." Here's the opening:

Having promised us a technological utopia, our ubiquitous and intrusive cyberculture has instead precipitated a spiritual crisis in which human experience has been systematically fragmented and the coherence of the self increasingly threatened. Living in a culture of organized distractions, our thoughts are isolated and disconnected, preventing us from seeing and experiencing the wholeness of life. Distraction and fragmentation have negative consequences for the organization of knowledge; they prevent us from engaging our spiritual depth and render us incapable of engaging the spiritual depth of others, for having lost touch with our own personhood, we can receive neither the personhood of our neighbor nor of God.

Constas then notes the immense, and often catastrophic, costs of modern distractions. He next turns to our main theme, the antidote of attention:

Attentiveness offers us a profound and effective response to our modern culture of organized distractions. To be sure, the “ethics and ascetics of attention” that Matthew Crawford is seeking [in his book The World Beyond Your Head] are central to Orthodox anthropology and moral psychology, namely: the practice of “attentiveness” (προσοχή) or “attending (or giving heed) to thyself” (προςέχειν σεαθτῶ).

This phrase—which is only superficially related to the Socratic injunction (γνῶθι σαυτόν [know thyself])—occurs in various forms in the New Testament, but is in fact derived from Deuteronomy 4:9: “Attend (or Give heed) to thyself, and keep thy heart diligently” (πρόσεχε σεαθτῶ καὶ φύλαξον τὴν ψυχὴν σου σφόδρα) or, alternately, from Deuteronomy 15:9: “Attend to thyself, that there be no hidden, iniquitous word in your heart (πρόσεχε σεαθτῶ μἡ γένηται ῥῆμα κρθπτὸν ἐν τῆ καρδία σου ἀνόμεμα). The phrase, which is an ethical imperative, has a long and rich history, from which only a few examples can be cited here.

He gives some of those examples from the likes of The Life of Anthony by St. Athanasius and St Basil the Great's "On the Words, 'Give Heed to Thyself.'" And then:

The extraordinary emphasis given to attentiveness is explained, not simply because the human mind is prone to distraction, but because the disintegration of our inner life began precisely with the fall, when humanity separated itself from God. “Distraction,” from this point of view, has rightly been called “the original sin of the mind.”

The notion of the primal transgression as a fall from attentiveness into distractions is a central element in the theology of the fifth-century writer, St. Diadochos of Photiki: “Divine knowledge teaches us that our natural perceptive faculty is single, but that it split into two different modes of operation as a result of Adam’s disobedience.” Created with a single, simple, and undivided consciousness, the fall shattered the integrity of the self into two conflicting activities, one drawn to divine realities, and the other dragged outward into the surface appearances of the visible world through sense perception, and subject to a process of ongoing fragmentation.

Constas continues:

Yet, if attentiveness is the answer to the dilemma of human fragmentation and disintegration, the aim is not a return to a presumed Edenic form of consciousness, but rather to the grace of the Holy Spirit, placed in our hearts at the time of our baptism. This sacramental focus is central to the spiritual theology of Diadochos, for whom healing begins with the gift of the Holy Spirit, while the duality of the fallen self is unified through the invocation of the Jesus Prayer.

Skipping forward, the conclusion is so good—it articulates our mission at EDI (especially the third paragraph)—that I'm going to spill the beans and include the whole thing here:

The fallen human mind is fragmented, prone unceasingly to distractions, and scattered across a troubled infinity of disconnected thoughts and sensations. Our minds are always elsewhere than our bodies. Rather than working to alleviate this constitutive weakness, we have built a culture of organized distractions, aiding and abetting the mind in its fallen condition. It can be argued that the computer itself is a fallen mind, a powerful extension of our own dubious desires, created after our own image. Lingering unregenerately in a realm of illusions; mesmerized by the images flitting about on our computer screens, we become “dull, predatory flies buzzing on the chamber window” [adapted from Emily Dickinson poem “How Many Times These Low Feet Stagered”], desperate to consume all the futility of the world.

Yet we are not the predators, but the prey. We are not the users of information technologies and social media, but rather are being used, manipulated, and exploited by them. In our culture of distractions, public and private spaces are saturated with technologies designed to arrest and appropriate our attention; our interior mental lives, like our bodies, are merely resources to be harvested by powerful economic interests (Crawford suggests that distractibility is to the mind what obesity is to the body). Our focus, then, should not be on technology and digital culture alone, but on the interests and motivations that guide their design and promote their dissemination into every aspect of our life.

Throughout its long history, Christianity has often been subservient to the prevailing political and economic structures, forgetting that the Gospel is not derivative of human culture, but generative of a new way of life. We need to recover the power of the Gospel as a counter-cultural force, not with the aim of destabilizing society, but in order to create life-affirming communities. We need to rediscover, not simply that our faith and vocation to holiness set us apart from the world, but that they also engender a new, alternative world; not a virtual reality, but the reality of virtue.

In order to realize our calling, attentiveness must be our fundamental attitude and ethos. Without attentiveness there is no prayer, and without prayer, there is no communion with God, no participation in divine life. The practice of inner attention, of descending with the mind into the heart, is both an activity and a way of life that locates us in authentic existence, that is, in our relationship to God. This is why attentiveness is so often said to be equivalent to the recollection of God, the conscious awareness of the grace of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. Taking heed of, and attending to, ourselves is the most effective method for reclaiming ownership of our self-determination from those who wish to take it from us. Transfigured by grace, attention will discover new objects of attention, because it will have its source in a new subject, no longer conformed to the form of the world, but transformed in the renewal of its mind (Rom 12:2), possessing and possessed by the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16).

I strongly encourage you to print off and read the entire piece here:https://irp.cdn-website.com/a8455a5a/files/uploaded/Constas-%20Attend%20to%20Thyself_Attentiveness%20and%20Digital%20Culture_Published%20version.pdf In fact, I encourage you to read it and then re-read it...multiple times before the Symposium. And don't forget to register for what promises to be one of our best Symposia to date! https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/copy-of-eighth-day-symposium-2024

AD FONTES ACADEMIC WEEK
This newsletter turned out to be far longer than I anticipated. So I'm going to wrap things up quickly by offering you a link to a piece I wrote for our first Inklings Festival which ties thematically into the 2024 Ad Fontes Academic Week (it's one of the very few times, if not the only time, that I'll offer a critique of C. S. Lewis): "An Inexhaustible Vere Kind of Christianity: A Thicker Kind of Mere": https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/an-inexhaustible-vere-kind-of-christianity

On the Feast of SS. Peter & Paul, Leaders of the Apostles The saints are an incentive to virtue for those who hear and see them with understanding, for they are human icons of excellence, animated pillars of goodness, and living books, which teach us the way to better things.