In this episode of the Symbolic World podcast, I'm playing for you a discussion that I had with Father Stephen Freeman.

Father Stephen Freeman is an Orthodox priest. He is also an author and a famous blogger.

And I wanted to discuss with him many things, especially his vision and his understanding of beauty, of the importance

of beauty in the world of how it can transform us. But we also ended up talking very

interestingly about the necessity to recognize the individual, to recognize the particular

and how, although we are attached to the transcendent as Christians,

we also need to understand that the transcendent always manifests itself within the particular.

And so I hope you enjoy.

Music This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Father Stephen, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you're a priest,

but you're also an Orthodox convert. Maybe you can tell us just a quick glimpse of what you're

doing, what you're interested in, and then we can dive right

into the subject. Yes, thank you. It's good to be with you. And for myself, I am a convert. My family

and I entered the Orthodox Church in 1998. For about 20 years before that, I served as an Episcopal priest. So if there's one thing that

would tie those two traditions together would be Anglicanism for a long time, had a real

feel for beauty, for liturgical things, and some feel for the tradition.

My sense for orthodoxy, maybe this is, you could say this connected to reality.

Orthodoxy can be kind of messy.

It's got a 2,000 year history unbroken.

But, you know, that's real.

That's different than getting in arguments about whose church is better, whose ideas are better.

I kind of look at this as a given.

Like, this is the Christianity that was given, and it has, you know, all kinds of complexities

...