Fr. John discusses cosmology, a concept that was very important to the early Church.

Fr. John explores what could be called the catacomb culture of the Church in relation to the Roman Empire.

Fr. John fills in the picture of the Church's early subculture.

Fr. John addresses the uncertainty in Byzantium following the death of Constantine and then the consolidation of Christianity shortly after that.

Fr. John discusses the life and activities of St. Pulcheria, as well as how the Trisagion came into Orthodox worship.

Fr. John explores the triumph of Orthodoxy in the year 843 and the way in which it enables the art of Christendom to express the deepest conviction about man's relationship with God and the possibility of communion with Him.

Fr. John explores traditional Christian temple or church architecture and locates the principle of heavenly orientation at work.

Fr. John continues his discussion of traditional Christian architecture.

Fr. John discusses the development of Christian hymnography.

Fr. John looks at some of the actual texts of early Christian hymns and the way in which they gave expression to the vision of early Christendom.

Fr. John looks at a couple of consequences of St. Augustine's anthropology in the West.

Fr. John describes the desanctification of the world that began to occur in the time leading up to the Great Schism.

Fr. John looks at the development that took place within the Frankish lands themselves, especially those concerning the liturgy.

Fr. John examines the tendency toward eucharistic piety in Frankish Christendom.

Fr. John discusses the baptism of Saint Vladimir and shares an introductory anecdote about the death and canonization of Saints Boris and Gleb.

In this opening anecdote of a new reflection in the podcast, Fr. John examines a famous account of a medieval English knight's pilgrimage to Ireland and vision of purgatory there, relating how it documents the rise of a new type of piety in western Christendom.

In this episode of his reflection on the new Christendom of the middle ages, Fr. John discusses the new ecclesiology of Roman Catholicism, contrasting it to Orthodoxy and concluding with a reference to its most notorious statement, the papal bull Unum Sanctum of Boniface VIII.

In this episode, Fr. John describes the revolutionary changes that came to characterize western monasticism after the Great Schism, leading to the rise of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Templars.

Fr. John addresses the foundations in the West of a growing pessimism about man's condition, paying particular attention to Augustine.

Fr. John discusses the Christian statecraft of early Christian Russia.

In the latest episode of his reflection on the new Christendom of the medieval west, Fr. John discusses the new approach to theology fostered by scholasticism, contrasting it with traditional Christian theology.

In his conclusion to this reflection, Fr. John discusses the Roman Catholic theological principle of "doctrinal development," and traces the origins of four new doctrines that arose in the west after the Great Schism.

After a transition to his new parish assignment, Father John returns to the podcast with a discussion of the atmosphere of catastrophe that hung over the old Christendom of the east as the Muslim Turks advanced on Byzantium, while a defender of traditional Christianity, Saint Mark of Ephesus, prepared to depart for the unionist Council of Florence in the west.

Fr. John introduces the force that kept traditional Christianity on course at a moment of crisis in the east, Hesychasm, and how it maintained Christendom's focus on paradise.

In this episode, Fr. John describes why Saint Gregory's defense of hesychasm against the westernized Barlaam represented a defense not only of Orthodoxy, but of Christendom itself.

In this episode, Fr. John draws upon several scholarly works to show how hesychasm protected eastern Christendom from the forces that had begun to lead the new Christendom of the west away from traditional Christianity.

Fr. John discusses the rise of the Franks in Western Christianity.

Fr. John gives an account of the atmosphere in Italy in which Orthodox and Roman Catholic delegates met to discuss the possibility of union in the middle of the fifteenth century. Only one of the Orthodox would refuse to sign the resulting Treaty of Union, Saint Mark of Ephesus.

In this final episode of Reflection 17, Fr. John relates the final catastrophe to befall eastern Christendom during the period, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

In this episode, Fr. John discusses Muscovite Russia's encounter with the West in the face of Uniatism, military invasion, and theological "captivity," all of which contributed to the decline of eastern Christendom.

In this final episode of his reflection on Muscovite Russia, Fr. John describes the Old Believer Schism as a crisis in the formerly optimistic cosmology of eastern Christendom, leading to its decline on the eve of modern times.

In this episode, Fr. John discusses ways in which papal supremacy led to the growing sense of crisis that preceded the Protestant Reformation.

In this latest episode on the impending Protestant Reformation, Fr. John discusses ways in which the long legacy of pessimism about the human condition and the world in general undermined western Christendom at one of her most critical moments.

In this episode, Father John continues his discussion of developments that led to the Protestant Reformation, emphasizing doctrines and practices related to human salvation.

In this episode Father John concludes his reflection on the critical state of western Christendom on the eve of modern times, exploring how the Reformation tried to resolve the issue of anthropological pessimism but ironically served to intensify it.

Fr. John discusses the dignity of man according to the Greek Fathers

Fr. John contends that to understand the coming of the Renaissance and its humanism, one really needs to understand how in the West the doctrines about man became increasingly pessimistic.

Fr. John concludes his account of the influence of the Franks by returning to the question of the filioque and how the papacy's resistance to its insertion in the Creed finally came to an end on the eve of the Great Schism.

Fr. John delineates the various ways in which Constantine contributed to the Christianization of the Roman state.

Fr. John continues to discuss St. Augustine by looking first at his notorious doctrine of original sin and its impact on the conception of man in the West.

In this episode Father John describes some of the most noteworthy effects of the Protestant Reformation on Western Christendom, emphasizing the decline of a sacramental basis for civilization and the rise of a primarily moral one.

Returning after a long absence from the podcast, Fr. John in this episode introduces a new reflection on the crisis of western Christendom prior to the Reformation by discussing the penitential context of Martin Luther's famous Ninety-Five Theses.

Fr. John discusses the spiritual transformation of time by Christianity.

Fr. John discusses the ways in which the Church tries to create a sanctified topography in Christendom.

In this episode Fr. John Strickland discusses various ways in which Christendom's leadership rejected the reformational Christianity that had provoked the wars of Western religion and replaced it with science, philosophy, pietistic Christianity, and a new religion known as deism.

In the nineteenth century, some Christians in America developed radically new visions of God's relationship to man and the cosmos. This "utopian Christianity" produced Unitarianism, Mormonism, and a string of millenarian sects. Father John Strickland concludes the episode with one of the most daring and disturbing examples of American utopianism, the community of Oneida in upstate New York.

In this anecdotal introduction to Reflection 21, Father John relates a remarkable but short-lived revolution in fourteenth-century Rome that served as a sign of what the age of utopia would bring. Listeners who enjoy the music of Richard Wagner will recognize the ill-fated revolutionary's name and understand why the turbulent nineteenth-century composer was attracted to him! And speaking of music, if you are wondering about the new closing sequence, it is a chorus from Mozart's utopian opera The Magic Flute and consists of the following (in translation): "When virtue and justice strew with fame the path of the great, then earth is a realm of heaven, and mortals are like the gods."

In this episode the "father of humanism," Francesco Petrarch, broods over his sense of guilt and despair, seeking a new path for Western Christendom known as the saeculum, or "secular."

Modern historians often bring attention to the effects of secularization on the West. Once traditional Christianity ceased to influence Western culture, the experience of the kingdom of heaven naturally diminished, something the famous German sociologist Max Weber called the "disenchantment of the world." In this episode, Fr. John describes how the concept of the saeculum, a kind of neutral cultural space cut off from the life of the Church, first appeared, and how, with Petrarch, it became a haven for humanists fleeing the pessimism of the fourteenth century.

In this episode, Father John relates a case in which the early humanist Petrarch confronted one of the new Christendom's chief architects, Pope Innocent III. Applying his newly developed secular thinking, he rejected the pope's notorious treatise entitled On the Misery of the Human Condition.