church bell from below

No Other Foundation

Reflections from Fr. Lawrence Farley

Fr. Lawrence Farley

About Fr. Lawrence Farley

Fr. Lawrence serves as pastor 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.

Story and History

When we are reading the literature of the ancient Hebrews (i.e. the Old Testament) it is important to be aware of the kind of glasses we are wearing—that is, we should be aware of the unspoken conceptual presuppositions that we bring to...
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Closing the Doors

In every Orthodox Liturgy there comes a moment when the deacon cries out, “The doors!  The doors!”  This is not (as one parishioner once informed me) the directive to open the Royal Doors of the iconostas, but to make sure that the main...
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Great Lent: “The King in His Beauty”

Now that Great Lent is upon us, the question sometimes arises about where we should put our spiritual focus.  There are two places we should certainly not put our focus—and only one place where we should.       The first and most...
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A “Call of Duty” Spirituality

Presented for your consideration (as Rod Serling used to say):  an old man dressed up as an Orthodox priest-monk who is actually neither priest nor monk, performing outrageous antics both in public and online in a furious attempt to draw...
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Haggai, Being Small in a World of Big

The work of the prophet Haggai is short and easy to miss; it is a mere two chapters in our Bibles sandwiched in between the books of Zephaniah and Zechariah.  If you are flipping quickly through the final pages of the Old Testament he...
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Menstruation and Holy Communion

I remember once when a friend was sharing with me his distress at the liberalism afflicting his Protestant denomination, and the fact that many of their clergy were denying such things as the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ. ...
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Crisis of Confidence: A Book Review

I have just finished reading Crisis of Confidence:  Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity, by my friend Carl R. Trueman.  Dr. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove...
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An Orthodox Priest Converts to Islam

Every so often one encounters something that breaks the head as well as the heart.  By that I refer to things that not only wring the heart with grief, but also confound the head because they are so perversely stupid.  One such thing is...
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Was Phoebe a Deaconess?

I am told that during a very interesting and well-run radio show about deaconesses, it was agreed (or at least widely thought) that Phoebe, mentioned famously in Romans 16:1, was a deaconess.  But was she?       By “deaconess” I mean the...
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Seeing the Sea

I have just now finished re-reading the seminal 2007 book The Language of God, written by physician-geneticist and Christian Francis S. Collins, the man under whose leadership the Human Genome was finally mapped in 2003.  It is an...
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Leavening the Lump

I note with no surprise whatsoever the news out of England, which is that the Church of England has decided to bless homosexual partnerships.  Two priestesses, the Rev. Catherine Bond and the Rev. Jane Pearce had their union blessed at...
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Mystical Psalter Volume 2 now available

I am pleased to announce that The Mystical Psalter volume 2 - Psalms 42 - 89 is now available for purchase through Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions. Like volume 1 of this 3-volume series, it includes an original translation...
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Adorning the Epiphaneia of the King

The feast whose season we now in is called “Theophany” or (in many places) “Epiphany”.  This latter is not so much an English word as it is a transliteration of a Greek word, epiphaneia.  It is often rendered “appearance” in the English...
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