A “Slackness of the Soul”: Finding Hope in the Existential Time Warp of Acedia

 I was honored to contribute an essay by the above title to the Summer 2021 issue of Vita Poetica. Here’s a taste:

The unnerving part about living through a time of change is, well, the change of time. 

Life-altering events—whether personal or global—have a way of unhinging the present moment from what came before and what was supposed to come after. Time seems to fall off the tracks of its forward-moving momentum, leaving us stranded between stations, wondering where we are and when things will start moving again.

The gnawing sense of time’s stagnation is a hallmark symptom of what ascetical theologians of late antiquity called acedia (ἀκηδία), a term that in the original Greek conveys an absence of care or effort, particularly with regard to spiritual labor.  

Read (or listen!) to the full essay on Vita Poetica.