An article about a presentation made in my neighbouring province of Alberta some time ago made me wonder if I didn’t live in the Twilight Zone rather than Canada. Twelve years ago, a baby girl was born in Alberta by the name of Wren...
Today I joined the sad multitude of those mourning the passing of the Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko, theologian, writer, Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, known to the many who loved him simply as “Father Tom”. Tributes...
Those reading the title of this article will perhaps remember a book of similar name written by Martin Buber, I and Thou, first published in German in 1923. Buber’s main thesis in the book is that human beings have a choice in their...
Devotion to St. David of Wales (and to all the western saints) serves a very important role in the Orthodox Church—it rescues us from the accusation that we are merely “the Eastern Church” (as some textbooks describe us), the eastern...
It is difficult to tune in to a newscast or to social media these days without learning about the latest atrocities committed by ISIS (sometimes referred to as ISIL, “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”). This jihadist group...
As we have seen from previous posts, in her book Christians and the Holy Places: the Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins, Taylor argued that none of the churches which Constantine built in the Holy Land were erected on authentic sites—not...
This week we continue to examine the assertions of a scholar, Joan E. Taylor who in her book Christians and the Holy Places: the Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, makes the case that none of...
Recently I examined the assertions of a scholar, Joan E. Taylor, in her book Christians and the Holy Places: the Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, to the effect that none of the holy sites on...
On Saturday January 17 I had the pleasure of being part of an ecumenical panel and giving a response from the Orthodox perspective on a keynote address on Roman Catholic ecumenism. The year 2015 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Decree...
In the May of 2013, through the kindness and generosity of my friend and deacon Gregory Wright, I visited the holy places in Palestine, fulfilling a lifetime dream. I went there with Deacon Gregory not so much as a tourist, but as an...
Our present culture, speaking through a thousand movies, magazine articles, and television shows, takes it for granted that people will be sexually active, and that sexual activity has little or nothing to do with marriage. This activity...
There is no doubt about it—Hitler was a very bad man. According to the traditional numbers, he was responsible for the slaughter of about six million Jews in “the Holocaust”, though of course responsibility for this massacre must be...
Often we clergy are asked about the nature of evil—is evil a substance, a kind of positive negativity? Or is it the mere absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light?Strict dualists (like the ancient Zoroastrians) would say that...
In any sustained discussion regarding the progress of liberal theology in the Orthodox Church, one sooner or later encounters magical thinking. Magical thinking is defined by Wikipedia (that modern oracle) as “the attribution of causal...
If you are at all like me, it is not Christmas until you have seen the holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has been shown seasonally every year since it first appeared in 1965. I have watched it faithfully every year since I...
