This page sets up discussions of critical theory as a basis for exploring contemplation.  Critical theory, especially in the past decade or so, has reached deep into the contemplative tradition to retrieve themes and subjects for consideration in our postmodern context.  Critical theory, for example, has taken seriously the limits of language and human knowledge that contemplative theologians called "apophatic theology," the kind of theology that acknowledges the human-bound categories of language and the way that limits how people know and experience God.  Critical theory also takes up other themes: the need for asceticism, the vices and virtues, and the need for discernment of what is truly good and evil from what is only apparently good and evil.  These themes abound, of course, in the Philokalia, which we have been mining for the Contemplative Thought of the Week.  So we engage with critical theory to open new avenues of thought and patterns of thinking to enhance our capacity for contemplation.