Matthew Milliner

At Donald Trump's old church, Mary and the fugitive Holy Family are there—just tucked in the corner, safely out of sight. Continue Reading »

It turned out there was no need to condemn Sigisimondo to hell—his own defeats brought him to his knees. The Tempio Malatestiano, moreover, is now an active church, and people are trickling in for Saturday confession. Our group stops for discussion, and we concede a reluctant parallel with our own American Sigisimondo, and then we imagine the ruins of a bankrupt Trump hotel, its deserted lobby the setting for a humble Mass. Continue Reading »

This monk is not letting us go without a sermon, but he’s earned it. We—a group of scholars brought together for a conference in Romania celebrating the legacy of the historian Peter Brown—have been treated well. We are standing in the Neamț monastery library, where the Philokalia, that . . . . Continue Reading »

It is not the labor that is divided; but the men,” complains the author. Society produces “morbid thinkers, and miserable workers” because we have separated thought from labor in pursuit of a destructive freedom. What we need instead is a countercultural submission to the patterns of creation, . . . . Continue Reading »

The following remarks were among several friendly responses to Professor Miroslav Volf’s presentation, “Do Christians & Muslims Worship the Same God?” delivered at the Islamic Foundation of Villa Park, IL on Feb. 27, 2016. Caught up in national headlines about our presumed Islamophobia, we . . . . Continue Reading »

An academic friend was visiting from abroad, and after a day of talks and teaching, we wound down around ten o’clock at night. Noticing my exhaustion, he offered a secret to decompression. “Zohmbies, Mahtt,” he counseled in his inimitable Greek accent. So it was that I tuned into my first . . . . Continue Reading »

The following is a sermon given last Sunday at All Souls Church (Wheaton, IL) in the wake of another Wheaton media controversy.

Among the more adventurous sallies in church décor in recent memory is the dancing saints sequence at San Francisco’s Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, where Hypatia, Charles Darwin and William Blake among others have been drafted into the communio sanctorum. Perhaps the program is less a . . . . Continue Reading »

The day after the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage this summer, I was in line for the Ferris Wheel with my three year old daughter. An insufficiently directive ride attendant left me confused as to which car to enter. Do we get our own? Do we pile in with strangers? Whatever our options might . . . . Continue Reading »

Sometime in the mid-1990s, sickened by what I perceived as the shallowness of evangelical culture in suburban Wheaton, Illinois, I launched into the post-hippie, proto-hipster nightlife of Chicago. I roamed not yet fully gentrified streets with dropouts and homeless people, under the L-tracks and along the wind-battered shores of the third coast. The counter-culture then radiated from Belmont Avenue, which I imagined to be something like what Haight-Ashbury (since colonized by Ben & Jerry’s) must have been in 1969.Following one such night of seeking suburban Wheaton’s opposite, I experienced a moment of transfixing beauty. I wandered into Lincoln Park Zoo at dawn and had it all to myself—a solitary Adam among the animals. Then, as I watched sea lions frolic in the shallows of their tank I braced myself for a return to Wheaton College where I would reluctantly (and barely) finish my undergraduate degree. In my arrogance, I may have even thought to myself that I was returning to splash in the shallows with evangelicals like the animals before me. Continue Reading »