May God's Kingdom Come: A Letter from the President

by Jesse Penna


Feast of St Gideon the New Martyr of Mount Athos

Anno Domini 2022, December 30

Brothers and Sisters in Christ!


Greetings to you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. May God have mercy on us as we seek to walk in His Kingdom in the days to come. And may God’s kingdom come, and His will be done in the work of Eighth Day Institute on earth as it is in heaven.


The EDI community continues to exist because of your support, so before I make any kind of request, I want to say THANK YOU for your support of EDI. I often say that the church wouldn’t function without volunteers who desire to serve God and others, and the same is true for EDI: we would not exist in the way that we do if you did not support us. So if you don’t hear anything else at all, please hear my heartfelt and deep thanks for your support that keeps our work moving forward. God willing, we will continue to move forward together for many more years to come.


I write to you offering one final appeal from the Board of Directors along with a few unique opportunities for your consideration on behalf of Eighth Day Institute. I recognize that you are receiving a lot of these year-end appeals for various organizations during this time. Furthermore, I know you have received several appeals from EDI board members, so I will be brief.


I want to begin by highlighting 3 unique opportunities for your consideration:


1.   We are looking for sponsors for our speakers for the upcoming Symposium. Would you be willing, or know someone, be it a church or a small group, or various individuals who might be willing to sponsor a speaker for our upcoming symposium? With sponsorship would come some additional time and perks related to the following speakers:

 Protestant:                Jake Meador

Orthodox:                  Fr. John Strickland

Catholic:                     James Matthew Wilson


2.   We are working on a substantial grant proposal, and are wondering if there is anyone in our EDI community who writes grants or knows someone who writes grants that might be willing and able to give some unpaid time over the next month to help us write a grant that could potentially be a “turning point” for the life of EDI?

 

3.   With the upcoming Symposium, we plan to have a members only reception at the end of the Symposium. We would like for you to come with your questions and thoughts concerning EDI as we consider together the state of the organization. If you are a member, please plan to join us on January 14, at 5:30 p.m. at St George Orthodox Christian Cathedral. 


If you have an interest or any leads on sponsoring a speaker, know of any potential grant writers, or have any questions or comments ahead of the symposium related to EDI, please feel free to call me at 316-641-9961 or email me at: jesse@efcmaym.org.


As an organization we need to raise $56,750 to end the year with a balanced budget. Will you give generously to help us meet our year-end goal of raising these funds to put us in a place of stability as we move into a new year and as we get ready for our 13th annual Symposium?  Please make your donation today here.


If you haven’t registered yet for the Symposium, please do so here. The Symposium is a great event to bring a friend to for face-to-face conversations you can’t have anywhere else. If you haven’t invited a friend to join you, please do. The banquet is also a great space for someone to get a taste of EDI if attending the Symposium is not possible. Please do consider registering and bringing a friend to the banquet which functions as a stand-alone fundraiser for EDI. The banquet is Friday, January 13 at 6:00 p.m. at St. George. Who has never been to an EDI event, that you could invite to join you at the banquet? You can register for the Festal Banquet by clicking here.


As we end 2022 and move into 2023 as an organization, I do pray that 2023 will be the year that we turn a corner and take the next step “To help the Church (i.e., members of the Christian community) learn how to be Christian in the modern age, ‘that all may be one,’ and, as a result renew the culture.” May God help us all as we continue to expose Christians to tradition and history seeking to create encounters with “the other.” As we continue to value tradition, education, community, ecumenism and cultural renewal, may God’s Kingdom come, and His will be done in our ongoing, collective work of Eighth Day Institute.

 

On behalf of Erin Doom and the Board of Directors,

Jesse Penna, President

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A New Universe, a New System of Stars: Why Babies are Necessary Icons for Us

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Inside the head of my three-month-old granddaughter, Lucy, said G.K. Chesterton is, "a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation...a new system of stars, new grass, new cities...and new seas." And this is because, he adds: The gravity of astonishment at the universe...dwells in the eyes of a baby three-months-old [and] the universe is put upon its trial and forces us actually to remodel our conduct...we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope...[with] delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body. But Chesterton's central thesis in this essay is not that babies are so marvelous, but that our treatment of each other as adults, in contrast, is so broken. "It is our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong," he writes, because we no longer see each other with astonishment and wonder (unless, that is, we are falling in love). But babies remind us that humans really are astonishing, and this "revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things" should force us to "remodel our conduct" toward everyone we meet. A baby seems to be a necessary icon for us, correcting our eyesight which grows old and struggles to see "the weight of glory" in each other as teenagers, adults, and perhaps especially, as old people. Even though he did not reference icons in his essay, we seem to drift very easily into what could be called a type of iconoclasm, an inability to see each other as image bearers of God Himself. William Wordsworth describes us as "trailing clouds of glory" when we first arrive here "from God, who is our home." But soon, he says, "shades of the prison-house" begin to smother us, and we forget. "We bow to grown people," says Chesterton in this same essay, "take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly." God speaks to us, like we are working through in St. John of Damascus , through the "cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology," or literally from the spoken word (cataphatic) or unspeakable word (apophatic). Apophatic I noticed has the same root in Greek as Infant does in Latin. Both mean "unspoken." God has given us both bibles and babies, speechless wonders through which He means to unglaze our eyes and fill us with astonishment. MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College

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One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 24, 2026
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