As a child of the 60s, I freely admit that our generation back then carried in our hearts a not inconsiderable amount of naivety. For the young’uns among us who cannot remember such ancient history as the 1960s, it was a time of youth...
Sometimes one comes across a tale so improbable and strange that you feel sure the teller of the tale is making it up—something so bizarre, you feel, it simply cannot be true. Such is the tale of “Friend Mother” Buchan and the few...
When I was a child in grade five, I was given a New Testament by the Gideon Society, like everyone else in my grade. Note: the New Testament, not the entire Bible. I suspect that the decision to confine the gift to the New Testament...
I am often asked by catechumens questions of basic liturgical etiquette, such as how to enter the church, how to venerate an icon, and when to make the sign of the cross. I am always happy to explain and (if in church) to demonstrate,...
There are, I suggest, two ways to experience the world. The first is that of the materialist: the world is all that exists. The physical world that we see and experience has no real or intrinsic meaning; it just is. We can, if we...
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...
