church bell from below

No Other Foundation

Reflections from Fr. Lawrence Farley

Fr. Lawrence Farley

About Fr. Lawrence Farley

Fr. Lawrence serves as Rector Emeritus of St. Herman's Orthodox Church in Langley, BC. He is also author of the Orthodox Bible Companion Series along with a number of other publications.

The Curate’s Egg: the Legacy of Fr. Seraphim Rose

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...
Read more →

N. T. Wright and the Abortion Debate

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...
Read more →

The Courage to Confess

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...
Read more →

An Announcement or Two

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...
Read more →

Reunion

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...
Read more →

A Shelter for the Anti-woke

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...
Read more →

Messianic Salvation: National or Christological?

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...
Read more →

“Is There In Truth No Beauty?”

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...
Read more →

Why Do the Orthodox Pray for their Devout Dead?

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...
Read more →

Girl Boss Self-empowerment and the Song of Songs

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...
Read more →

A Christian Response to War

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...
Read more →

The Dying of the Light

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...
Read more →

Naivety

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...
Read more →

The Idolatry of Andrew Innes

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...
Read more →