St. Peter once offered his new Gentile converts some advice about the task of being in the world while not being of the world: “Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and strangers to avoid fleshly desires which wage war against the soul” (1...
“We’re all dying, aren’t we?” These words could have come from the lips of any thoughtful philosopher from the days of Marcus Aurelius on. In fact they came from the lips of Marilyn Monroe in the last complete film she ever made, “The...
Should the Keystone Pipe-line be built? Is globalization a good thing? Which political party should we vote for? These are questions which have provoked a tremendous amount of debate, not excluding loud shouting and mass protest,...
How should one interpret the Bible? What rules should govern our exegesis? One approach is to toe the party line, a kind of exegetical “be true to your school” approach. This approach looks not primarily to the Biblical text itself, but...
The importance of John the Baptizer may be gauged by the amount of paint and ink the Church spends on him. His portrait is painted and is found on every single icon-screen in all the churches, regardless of whether or not he is that...
Happenings up here in Canada may not make headlines in the U.S. but one happening up here of late should be of some concern to all Christians in the West. I refer to the recent ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada which upheld the right...
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Metropolitan Kallistos—or at least to Timothy Ware. I read his book The Orthodox Church long ago and it was an important part of my conversion to Orthodoxy. I still have the somewhat battered volume on...
It has been somewhat forcibly brought to my attention lately that there are a number of ways of reading the early chapters of the Book of Genesis. One way is to acknowledge the presence of non-literal elements in those chapters and even...
During my time in the Jesus People as an Evangelical Charismatic Protestant, it was taken for granted that the modern State of Israel, established by the Great Powers in 1948, was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and a sign of the...
Most Evangelical Protestants do not have a great love for Latin (people of my vintage can remember when Latin was inevitably associated in Evangelical minds with the horrible benighted Catholics, who used Latin as their liturgical...
The Council of Nicea ended a long time ago (in 325) and Arius is very, very dead. Why do we still make such a big deal about the Council and commemorate it at such an important time—i.e. right after Pascha and before Pentecost? There are...
The first knock-down drag-out theological scrap I ever had was in high school and it was over the doctrine of Eternal Security. I was not keen to have the scrap because the person I was contending with was a spectacularly pretty girl to...
The term “dialogue” (along with its synonyms, “conversation” and “discussion” and “engagement”) seems to have taken its place alongside the proverbial terms “motherhood”, “apple pie”, and “the flag” as sacred and untouchable. It used to...
The apostles’ hearts were filled with rage. The Master was heading toward Jerusalem, and He had sent messengers on ahead to secure lodging for Himself and His apostles. Some of the messengers had entered a town of the Samaritans, but...
If there is one thing that is often calculated to get the polemical blood flowing in the veins and send one rushing to the barricades, it is the origin stories in the Book of Genesis. One’s understanding of those first eleven chapters in...
