In a well-known passage from Matthew’s Gospel about one of Christ’s resurrection appearances, the passage read at the baptismal service, we find the following words: “The eleven disciples proceeded to Galilee, to the mountain to which...
One often hears the refrain that “the Septuagint is the Old Testament of the Orthodox Church”. (For those late to the party: the Septuagint—often abbreviated as “LXX”—is the Greek translation of the Old Testament made in Alexandria...
In the service of Sunday Matins (in Greek Orthros) of the Orthodox Church we find a series of eleven hymns called “the songs of light” (Greek exaposteilaria or photagogika), short stichs which summarize and describe the content of the...
There is much talk among Christian feminists of the necessity of utilizing “women’s gifts” in the Church and of the subsequent necessary ordination of women in order to allow for this utilization. Obviously nobody wants to have anyone’s...
I cannot be the only Orthodox pastor to have been asked occasionally by my people about the meaning of the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian. In its (OCA) translation, it reads, “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the...
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...
If there is one thing that is lamentably common in almost all feminist writing it is the apparent inability to reconcile the complementary concepts of ontological equality and hierarchical subordination. Briefly, if two things are...
Christ’s counsel to Nicodemus that “ye must be born again” (John 3:7) with its assertion that one must be born again to enter the Kingdom of God is arguably the favourite verse of Protestant Evangelicals. It certainly formed the bedrock...
With Fr. Marcus Burch, Chancellor of the Diocese of the South, my host in the area and arranger of the talk at Furman University. The crowd at the Daniel Chapel of Furman University where the talk “Who Goes to Hell?” was given. The...
My grandchildren are growing up in an odd world, much odder than grandpa could have imagined when he was their age. Much of the oddness and insanity in their Brave New World has to do with sexuality and gender. Their school system...
On Monday February 5 I will be flying to South Carolina to spend the following week and weekend with the good Orthodox people of South Carolina and Georgia and giving talks at Furman University and in the local parishes about the...
I have been reading the Book of Daniel for many years since my conversion to Christ in 1970, which also means (a bit unfortunately) that I have been reading commentaries on the Book of Daniel for almost as long. The commentaries came in...
In this last February 2017, the Patriarchate of Alexandria ordained six “deaconesses” in the Congo, an action which was hailed by some as a courageous and much-needed step forward, and decried by others who warned that it was a dangerous...
Good theology can pop up in unexpected places. One such place is the writing of Dr. Seuss, writer of children’s books. My favourite theological work of his is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a story of conversion and redemption. I...
Polemics has a rather bad name—perhaps not surprisingly, since it comes from the Greek word polemos, meaning “war”. Some people in particular are distressed when they see in Christian writers anything polemical or negative. Why, they...
