Borrowing the words of an old Gordon Lightfoot song, there hangs a ribbon of darkness over Canada, my home and native land. The Lightfoot song described the singer’s sadness and grief at the departure of someone loved and needed in his...
Thousands of years ago when I was an Evangelical Protestant in the Anglican Church, I never prayed to the saints or asked for their intercession. It was made quite clear to me by those around me that obedient Christians never did that...
It is a wonderful thing to know the Scriptures well, but there is a drawback: since we know how all the stories end, we can miss the drama inherent in the narrative. For example, In Luke 7:11f we can read about the grief of the widow...
As reported in the Byzantine Texas blogsite, the Ecumenical Patriarch is calling for a unified observance of Easter by next year, 2025, to coincide with the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea. In a sermon he said, “We beseech the...
I confess up front that this is a question I never imagined that I would examine in this blog. I had assumed that Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians would not be reading No Other Foundation or any Orthodox work, and anyway, such...
Ah, England. I love it: the home of Shakespeare, the Crown Jewels, London Bridge, Big Ben…and constant ecclesiastical weirdness. It seems just yesterday that we were treated to the spectacle of two lesbian priestesses exulting over...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
