I have recently been asked to make available material from previous years’ blog pieces about the days of Holy Week and Pascha. The task reminds me of the memorable aphorism attributed to Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà-vu all over again!”...
There is a psalm found in the Six Psalms chanted at every Matins in the Orthodox Church that is unique among the psalms of the Psalter. Psalm 88 (87 in the Septuagint numeration) is a psalm that contains not a glimmer of light or hope....
I suppose that the adjective “Pentecostal” in the title should be placed in scare quotes, because by “Pentecostal Orthodoxy” I do not refer to a combination of Protestant Pentecostalism and Orthodoxy, but that Orthodoxy itself is...
I recently read two excellent books, Fr. Timothy Cremeens’ history of charismatic renewal in the Orthodox Church entitled Marginalized Voices, and Julia Duin’s account of the rise and fall of a prominent episcopal charismatic church in...
A number of years ago I was chatting with a co-worker at my secular job and she asked me to what church I belonged. When I answered, “the Orthodox Church”, she responded, “Oh, that church is so retro”. She was a sweet lady, and offered...
I suppose that most pastors have had the experience of a young parishioner approaching them privately and confiding in them their suspicion or decision that they were gay, bisexual, or transgender. Such confusion is in the air, has the...
In the debate about baptism with which we are all familiar, we may note a set of binary alternatives: either one baptizes an adult candidate on the basis of their mature decision to repent and believe or one baptizes an infant on the...
Every year during Lent we invite into our churches a great pastor, St. Andrew of Crete, and listen while he leads us in a meditation on sin and repentance. That is, we listen while his Great Canon is chanted, and in response we reply...
I have just finished reading a volume that should be a required text for anyone enthusing about how enlightened and tolerant Spain was under Islamic rule in medieval times, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandez-Morera....
Like many pastors in the Orthodox Church, I have been asked recently for my opinion about the events currently happening in Ukraine. I am quite willing to give my opinion when asked, since that is my job as a teacher and a presbyter. But...
Our secular society seems to believe that if an afterlife exists, it is a uniformly pleasant one, and that with the possible exception of mass murderers, Nazis, child-molesters and a few others who commit monstrous deeds, everyone goes...
My familiarity with Rowan Williams was, like that of most people, confined to knowing that he was the archbishop of Canterbury. Having left the Anglican Communion in 1985 I did not keep abreast of the latest news in the Church of...
Just as it is difficult to gain a true perspective of the size of a mountain when one is actually on the mountain, so it is difficult to understand how revolutionary a change is when in the midst of the revolution. And we are today in...
In my last blog piece, I suggested that the first thing one must do before reading a book is to recognize from which library shelf it came—that is, its literary genre. Or, put another way, one must ask oneself how the original readers of...
The first thing one must do before reading a book is to recognize from which library shelf it came—that is, its literary genre. For example, if one is reading a satire one will misunderstand its contents if one takes it for history or...
