Is there in truth no beauty? (Points to you if you can identify the television how where this comes from and double points if you can identify the original source.) To answer the question, consider the photos inset above.One is the...
I am sometimes asked why we Orthodox pray for our loved ones who have died and who were devout Orthodox Christians. Are we afraid that they won’t somehow “make it”? Do we think that by our prayers we can move them from hell into...
Rachel Zegler, God bless her, seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. She has become almost involuntarily the face of girl boss self-empowerment, the modern woman who denounces patriarchy (that nebulous foe), derides the notion of...
As a baby boomer child of the 1950s, I was taught to hate war. For my generation, war was an unmitigated evil (though, happily, this notion did not spill over into hating or disrespecting our soldiers—later described as...
When I was young, I read a famous poem that I now regard as one of the strangest poems ever written. It is the one entitled “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas with its repeated refrain “do not go gentle into that...
The showbiz news is all about the new Disney live-action remake of the classic and beloved 1937 Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I have not seen the new film and odds are you don’t have the kind of money it would...
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...
