I recently read in Jaroslav Pelikan’s excellent Jesus Through the Centuries a line from American scholar Arthur O. Lovejoy, who asserted, “The term ‘Christianity’ is not the name for any single unit of the type for which the historian of...
I am happy to report that there is a new book available from me through Amazon entitled Arise and Sing! It is a short collection of akathists that I have written through the past years not previously published and supplementing my...
If you Google the term “Pharisees” you find the following: “The Pharisees were a Jewish social movement and school of thought in the Levant during the time of Second Temple Judaism”. That definition is historically true, but...
It occurred to me recently that it is significant that the invisible enemy of our souls is called “the Evil One” in both the Lord’s Prayer and in such passages as 1 John 5:19. That is, our adversary is never named, but only referred to...
Very occasionally I am asked about what I think about the phenomena occurring in Medjugorje and whether the Orthodox Church believes they are genuine. Orthodoxy officially has “no comment” about what occurs outside of its own canonical...
From the days of Moses when God made a covenant through him with Israel to come and dwell in their midst, Israel has offered sacrifice to Yahweh their God. The detailed instructions for offering sacrifices and for the shrine centre...
Recently I was asked by one of my catechumens what the Orthodox thought about St. Joseph, the spouse of the Virgin Mary, called “St. Joseph the Betrothed” in our Orthodox Synaxarion because although he was betrothed to Mary, the marriage...
In many Orthodox churches, baptisms are done privately and almost secretly: after the morning Divine Liturgy at which the entire church community was present had concluded and all the people had left, a few people remained behind—or...
A number of Evangelical inquirers have asked exactly what we Orthodox mean in our prayer describing the Theotokos as “the salvation of the Christian people”. They also wonder what we can mean when we pray that we “may obtain paradise...
Hidden well away in the Greek of the genealogy with which St. Matthew opens his Gospel is a little theological secret—a secret which utterly vanishes in most English translations. Matthew begins his genealogy of Jesus by saying that...
Books of comparative religion such as I used to read way back in university (such as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions) gave the reader the impression that all religions, if not the same, were at least similar and that Christianity...
An ancient law in the Old Testament is assuming new significance in today’s increasingly secular culture. It is this: “You shall not move your neighbour’s boundary marker which the ancestors have set” (Deuteronomy 19:14). The law was...
I had thought of entitling this piece “About UFOs”, but then quickly reconsidered, not wanting to blow all my credibility before anyone had begun reading it. This piece is an unabashed and unapologetic rip-off of a chapter in Rod...
Much to my surprise, some time ago the Nicene Creed was trending online among the Southern Baptists, America’s largest Baptist organization. They were, apparently, debating whether or not that Creed should be added to their official...
Once when I was a new convert to Anglicanism (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) I asked my dear Anglican pastor why our Anglican Church no longer canonized any saints. I knew that the Roman Catholic Church continued to canonize...
