Rise and Converge with the Symphony of Truth

WHAT HATH the Ethics of Elfland to do with The Pen, the Pipe & the Pint? In other words, how can I justify organizing a festival that presents lectures on the virtuous life, organizes a seminar on smoking a tobacco pipe, and offers complementary beer-tastings from local brewers? Let me defend myself by appealing to two of my personal heroes.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, a twentieth-century Catholic theologian who was recently presented at the Hall of Men by our friend Nick Pohlenz, once described himself as a “kneeling theologian.” That self-characterization would rank high in the books of the fourth-century desert father Evagrius Ponticus. For it is Evagrius who famously defined the true theologian as one who truly prays. It also makes von Balthasar rank high in my books.

Von Balthasar penned an important little book in 1972 titled Truth Is Symphonic . In the prologue, he says God performs a symphony in His revelation: “The polyphonous orchestra of Creation . . . performs God’s symphony under the Son’s direction.” He goes on to note that the unity of the composition comes from God, that the world is and always will be pluralist, and that it will be increasingly so. Why an increasingly pluralist world? According to von Balthasar, “the purpose of its pluralism is this: not to refuse to enter into the unity that lies in God and is imparted by Him, but symphonically to get in tune with one another and give allegiance to the transcendent unity.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, a Catholic Inkling who is one of the key inspirations for our Inklings Festival, penned a mythological creation story in his book The Silmarillion. The myth sounds strikingly similar to von Balthasar. After creating the Ainur (“the Holy Ones”) and declaring a theme to them, Ilúvatar (“the One”) asks them to “make in harmony together a Great Music.” The story continues:

Then the voice of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.

Like von Balthasar’s description of Creation, Tolkien describes the creation of Elfdom as a beautiful symphony in which countless creatures are in tune with one another, all under allegiance to Ilúvatar, the transcendent unity.

Eighth Day Books houses an eccentric community of books. But it is symphonic. It is symphonic because its guiding principle of selection is truth. And because truth is symphonic, as we learn from von Balthasar, Warren’s house of lovingly chosen books has a way of symphonically moving those people who give their allegiance to the transcendent unity in tune with one another.

In a similar fashion, our first annual Inkling Festival could be described as an eccentric community of culture. Our principle of organization is also truth, so we’re confident it will be symphonic, as will all future Inklings Festivals. And we pray all of our work will symphonically get people like you in tune with one another.

Let me conclude by encouraging you to take the time to read our blog, The Patristic Word. It offers an opportunity for you to experience a symphony of truth. But I do have to offer a warning. Some readings are short and sweet, easy for just about anybody. Others, not so much. But don’t let that hold you back. Please heed this advice from St Gregory Palamas, a fourteenth-century Byzantine bishop, as he admonishes his flock:

Christ’s Church, especially here in this great city of Constantinople, includes not only persons who are simple and lacking in formal education, but also people who are wise and cultivated, both by nature and through the study of secular disciplines and the teachings of the Church. For that reason I do not for the most part make my homilies too basic. I prefer to help those who are lower to rise, rather than to bring down those who are higher on their account. Anyone, even if he is unlearned, who pays careful attention to my teaching, will not be wholly unaware of what I am saying. That portion, however small, which he can understand and take hold of and strengthen, fill, and save the heart which accepts it.

Flannery O’Connor, yet another hero of mine, titled one of her stories “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Whatever is true, whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, rises. So take hold of what you can, and rise. You will find yourself converging with everything else that is good, true and beautiful. And you will find yourself caught up in The Symphony of Truth that is performed by God and conducted by His Son.

Feast of St Dionysios the Areopagite
Anno Domini 2017, October 3

Erin Doom is the founder and director of Eighth Day Institute. He lives in Wichita, KS with his wife Christiane and their four children, Caleb Michael, Hannah Elizabeth, Elijah Blaise, and Esther Ruth.

*Slightly adapted from "A Note from Director Doom" in the 2015 Inkling Festival Notebook; originally posted July 23, 2015.

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

By Mark C. Watney • August 25, 2026

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

Church Against the Machine: A Review of Paul Kingsnorth's Latest Book

By Michael Simmon • August 25, 2026

"God became man, so that man might become God." St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation (54:3) These words from St. Athanasius may sound, at first blush, provocative. However, St. Athanasius is restating, perhaps more simply, what St. Peter says in his second epistle: the promise of being united to Christ is that men and women made in His image will partake in His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Paul Kingsnorth's latest book, Against the Machine, inverts this idea and opens our eyes to the world emerging at a rapid rate, the world dominated by what he calls The Machine. The new mantra of The Machine age is, instead, this: Man will become God by Man's own self-creation. Reading Kingsnorth is not for the faint of heart. It's easy to be overcome by despair. The goal of the Machine age is "transhumanism", to be liberated from the constraints of the body. For the transhumanist (self-described), the future is disembodied. The future is limitless. But this is not liberation. Because the Machine is not limited to the physical world, it follows naturally there is a spiritual nature to this lifestyle, what he ultimately identifies as a manisfestation and/or manipulation of the demonic. Whether or not you agree with his ultimate conclusion, we can see its effects. An entire generation, and many across generations, addicted to screens. Disintegration of communal life, most disastrously in the breakdown of the family. Increasing rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide, especially among children. It's clear we need a Savior, and the Machine isn't it. Instead, Kingsnorth encourages us toward a revival of community, men, women, and children living embodied lives in the same space and time: working together, eating together, worshipping together, loving each other, carrying each other's burdens. If this sounds like Eighth Day Institute...if this sounds like what the Church is meant to be, it is because this is exactly what the Church is. We are saved together in Christ. MICHAEL SIMMON currently serves as the Secretary of Eighth Day Institute Board of Directors and Coordinator for Hall of Men. He resides in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and four children.

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.

Rise and Converge with the Symphony of Truth

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

Church Against the Machine: A Review of Paul Kingsnorth's Latest Book

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

"And Please, Stay as Long as You Like"

What is Given and Given Up

Let the Church Rebuild You

The Rhythm of the Coop

Exult in Monotony

A Toast to St. Cyril of Alexandria

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