“On this Easter Sunday, we’re going to take you to a place outside our world. It’s not Mars or Venus but it might as well be. It’s a remote peninsula in northern Greece that millions believe to be the most sacred spot on Earth.

It’s called Mount Athos and prayers have been offered there every day, with no interruption, for more than a thousand years. It was set aside by ancient emperors to be the spiritual capital of Orthodox Christianity and has probably changed less over the centuries than any other inhabited place on the planet. The monks come to Mount Athos from all over and do everything they can to keep what they call “the world” far away.”

“60 Minutes” gets extremely rare access to the monasteries at Mt. Athos. Go watch.

A great place to spend some time is the back articles section of the Road to Emmaus Journal and there’s one article in particular that I’ve been waiting to get added: Celtomania in Eastern Siberia.

I heard Fr. Nicanor Lupeshev give a talk (and show a video) on this a few years back, and I was struck by the way in which Orthodox Christianity could interact with a very different culture. This is all good cross-cultural mission, but remember that Fr. Nicanor is a monk-priest and so has long hair, a long beard and wears a large cross over his robes.

This, then, is mission which is authentic and which does not try and pretend to be something else. Read it!

The existentialist philosopher I mentioned yesterday is Søren Kierkegaard, and much of his writing is available online.

You can view the Roman Catholic Catechism here and the section dealing with the role of tradition is here. An Eastern Orthodox perspective can be found on the Greek Orthodox Achdiocese of America’s website.

You might (or might not!) be interested in this article on the enlightenment from Kant’s perspective.

If there’s anything I’ve forgotten, please remind me in the comments.

We spent some time on Monday discussing the authority of scripture and the development of the canon in the early church. You’ll find all sorts of websites on this issues, most of them from a Protestant or Roman Catholic point of view, but I’d like to steer you towards an Orthodox viewpoint.

Our Life in Christ is an excellent podcast which tackles plenty of the points of tension between Orthodox and Evangelical Christianity. They had a series of podcasts on the issue of Sola Scriptura and posted some notes online which can be found here. They have taken an argument from an evangelical site (CRI) and put their response in blue (OLIC).

As always, this represents only one point of view but it is a good way of getting a feel for the arguments.