People who are staunchly pro-choice (i.e. who support the mother’s supposed right to have her unborn child killed at any time during the pregnancy for any reason) are usually at a loss to explain what precisely happens to the child so...
I once knew a dear man who said that he was the brother of a saint. Though I thought he was one of twelve children, he was actually one of thirteen children. It turns out that the youngest and thirteenth child died an hour or so after...
Saul of Tarsus was not a friend of The Way (as the followers of Jesus were then called). Saul was a Pharisee and a strict one and like many other Pharisees he regarded Jesus of Nazareth as a deceiver, a false prophet, a false Christ, a...
The phrase “the Curate’s egg” refers to a cartoon in an 1895 edition of Punch magazine, in which a nervous curate (i.e. an apprentice priest) is having breakfast with his bishop. When the curate shows reluctance to eat his egg because...
On June 1 the Right Reverend N. T. Wright was answering some questions on his Ask N.T. Wright Anything podcast. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and a widely-published and very popular scholar. I own his...
Christian discipleship has always required courage—sometimes a lot of courage, sometimes just a little. During the happy days of the Emperor Justinian, following Christ took (maybe) a smidgeon of courage, while during the unhappy days...
Well, okay, not really an announcement or two so much as an advertisement or two. In the absence of being able to put the information on roadside billboards, I am letting anyone who might be interested to know that I have published a...
I suppose it is because of some Facebook algorithm that has discerned that I am almost pathologically sentimental, but in my Facebook feed I regularly find videos of emotional reunions. Most of them are reunions of soldiers returning...
I will, alas, readily admit to at least one failing: I have little patience with what is called ‘woke’. Denunciations of our first Canadian Prime Minister as “colonial”, blaming “the patriarchy” for all perceived modern ills, flying...
I suppose that many people know that Christians read as sacred Scripture both the Old Testament (i.e. the Hebrew Scriptures) and the New Testament and that they further imagine that Christians interpret the Hebrew Scriptures in the same...
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...
