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 13^th 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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What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 31, 2026

"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

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

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 24, 2026

"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

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

What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

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

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