About

Theophaneia: Dispatches from the Eighth Clime is an eclectic blog oriented to the creative retrieval of Christian tradition understood as revealed truth expressed in Hebraic-Platonic idiom and insured by the light of illumined reason.

Our essays draw on the best in modern philosophy and theology in dialogue with other branches of Abrahamic revelation; with Indic, Sinitic, and Tibetan paths of realization; and with primordial and indigenous initiatic wisdom practices as disclosed through metaphysics, mystical theology, poetry, symbolism, myth, art, music, and beyond. The God’s-eye view that implicitly masquerades as a view from nowhere after it purports to have stormed heaven itself, to which we have become paradoxically too familiarized without ever knowing what it is—like fish in water—can be critiqued in a way that avoids the rocky crags of destruction and the siren song of construction only by our throwing the three into relief from many particularly embedded vantage points.

In homage to such recent—and by recent, we mean on the cusp of the déluge now proceeding to engulf our world order—luminaries of intensive reflection on the transcendent realm of divine ideas and its instantiation at the level of imagination as the animating core of personal and communal life as Alexander Golitzin, André Scrima, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Henry Corbin, Eric Voegelin, Gershom Scholem, A. K. Coomaraswamy, Mircea Eliade, Georges Dumézil, Pitirim Sorokin, Namkhai Norbu, Herman Dooyeweerd, Simone Weil, George Grant, C.S. Lewis, Franz von Baader, Warren Felt Evans, Emanuel Swedenborg, Richard Hooker, and myriad ancient, patristic and medieval sources of inspiration, we have placed Theophaneia under the patronage of Holy Wisdom. Our logo is a tribute to the Burning Bush (Rugul Aprins) Group of hesychasts and to our Blessed Lady the Theotokos. God remember the reader.

Please visit our YouTube channel or browse this Christian Platonism Reading List to help get your bearings with some resources for our core area of inquiry.

We publish essays from a diverse set of writers and thinkers around the world. If you wish to participate in some way, whether by submitting a piece, attending an online study group or discussion, or making a modest donation to help us cover our operating expenses, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Warm regards from our company of wayfarers in occidental exile.

Contact Us

Team

Brian Christopher Harris | Editor-in-chief

Brian is a high school History teacher-turned-seminarian who completed his M.Ed. degree at UMass Boston. He grew up at the confluence of two great streams of tradition: Anglo-Catholicism and Yoga Vedanta. He has spent over a decade gaining an acquaintance with unaccompanied folk song as practiced in France, the British Isles, and beyond. He is also a longtime participant in Sacred Harp singing and related traditions of hymnody; most recently, he has begun to learn Byzantine chant. He now dedicates most of his spare time to writing poetry, making music, and studying classical and medieval philosophical works (Platonic, Indo-Tibetan, Islamicate, and Scholastic) as well as the masters of contemplative prayer. He also reads modern theology (Sophiological, Thomistic, Patristic, Communio, Radically Orthodox, Swedenborgian) and is pursuing these areas of interest through a Master of Divinity degree at the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.

Nick Freiling | Managing Editor

Nick Freiling is an entrepreneur and father of five. He spends most of his time building startup brands, fishing Florida intracoastal waterways, and reading books.