This last May St. Ninian’s Anglican Church in Scarborough, Ontario was deconsecrated by the Anglican bishop of Toronto and returned to secular use. Usually the deconsecration of Anglican churches is of no interest to me, unless they are...
Orthodox people love symbols—we even find symbols in places where they don’t really exist, such as when we say that the Gospel Entrance in the Divine Liturgy is a symbol of Christ going out to preach. (Liturgical footnote: an entrance...
In reflecting on the recent legal overturn of Roe vs. Wade in the United States, I am acutely aware of my status as a foreigner here in Canada living north of all the action. The decisions of the United States Supreme Court have no...
One of the first things that clergy do after entering the church on Sunday morning for Divine Liturgy is to put on special clothes called “vestments”. They are highly stylized and every priest wears the same things: first the priest...
Everyone once in a while one finds a book that is illuminating, easy and fun to read, opens doors, and leaves you larger than you were before. Fr. John McGuckin’s St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography is such a book. I...
What are “traditional family values” and what is their role in the life of a Christian?First of all, it is important to understand what is not meant by the term “traditional family values”. In particular, the term does not mean that the...
The clergy friends I know are a diverse lot. Some are Orthodox, some are Protestant, some are Canadian, and some are American. But when I talk to them of late, I find that they all tell the same story: at the beginning of the Covid...
The year 1453 marked a very significant event in the life of the Orthodox Church, for that was the year that the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, effectively bringing to an end the long thousand year reign of the Christian Roman...
The ancient world was built on three fundamental realities—foundations which persist to this day—and Christ overturned all of them. No wonder His Church was considered both radical and dangerous.The first reality was the foundation of...
In our last blog piece we examined the fundamental fact about the Church’s essential nature—viz. that the Church was the actual Body of Christ, the manifestation of His presence in this age. Here I would like to examine another...
It is very easy for people, especially outsiders, to miss the fundamental fact about the Church. It is easy to assume that the Church is fundamentally an organization or (worse yet) a collection of clergy. That is perhaps because the...
Buried away in the midst of a long apostolic denunciation of the evils of a culture soaked in idolatry is the potent little phrase παρὰ φύσιν/ para physin, meaning that which is against φύσις, against nature, natural endowments, or the...
I am reliably told that in some parts of the Protestant world the feast we Orthodox are now celebrating is called “Resurrection Sunday”. Though it used to be universally known there as “Easter”, apparently some people in the Evangelical...
In my last blog piece I discussed the Old Testament view of the atonement. Here I would examine the New Testament understanding of the atonement.As with the Old Testament, there is in the New Testament no clear and detailed elaboration...
It is perhaps significant that there is no obvious and complete explanation of atonement and how it functioned in the Bible. My guess is that this was because it was too obvious to the ancients to require stating. People just knew...
