51�Թ�

After leaving the monastery, Doox went on to do just that, creating icons for two singular houses of worship in San Francisco: the St. John Coltrane Church, whose patron saint is the jazz legend, and the nearby St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, whose panoply of saints includes 90 people and four beasts, all dancing together.

“I have the difficulty or excitement of celebrating twice,” said its leader, Metropolitan Gregory of Nyssa, based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

As late as the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops and theologians as eminent as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria felt free to denounce private wealth as a form of theft and stored riches as plunder seized from the poor.

Miles works with one of the most liberal churches in the Anglican communion, St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco.

Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine—they all assumed that God’s creation was eternal, not something that unfolded in six days or any other temporal frame.