It is safe to say that the allegorical method has fallen upon hard times in the scholarly world. What was once considered a discovery of the deeper meaning of the Old Testament text is now almost universally derided in the academic halls...
Every age faces the temptation to remake the true God in its own image—or in other words, the temptation to idolatry. The brutal ages of barbarian northern Europe tended to refashion God into a kind of Christian Viking, a warrior God,...
When Mary of Nazareth first emerged from her mother as a newborn infant and uttered her first newborn cries, few then present could have had any inkling what that child would mean to human history. After an extended period of infertility...
Just to be clear: I am no fan of the Filioque—i.e. I believe that the insertion of the words “and from the Son” into the Latin version of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 325/ 381 was a mistake and that the insertion should be...
In his final post of this series (the first three may be viewed here, here, and here) we will look at the category of clean versus unclean in the Christian Faith, and its difference from the use of that category in religion. The category...
In previous posts in this series (accessed here and here) we looked at the difference between the Christian Faith and all the other religions, and suggested that the main difference lay in the fact that Christianity was not a religion,...
Sanctity is self-authenticating. That is, Christians know and recognize real holiness when they see it. We do not need to wait for Synods of Bishops to officially declare someone a saint in a canonical act of glorification before we...
In a previous post we looked at the difference between the Christian Faith and all the other religions, and suggested that the main difference lay in the fact that Christianity was not a religion, but rather the saving presence of Christ...
According to Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Orthodox Christianity is not a religion. In his For the Life of the World, he wrote, “Christianity is in a profound sense the end of all religion…Nowhere in the New Testament is Christianity...
Just a quick note to my dear online friends: I will be on vacation and away from the office from July 19 to August 5. During this time I will not be able to receive, moderate, or post any comments to my blog. So, if you do post,...
Ever since my college days many centuries ago, I have been reading about “the Johannine Pentecost”, by which scholars meant John’s version of the Pentecostal bestowal of the Spirit. The reference, of course, is to John 20:19-23. In this...
Recently Sr. Vassa Larin (famous for her “Coffee with Sr. Vassa” podcast) has attracted much and varied attention from a correspondence she published in which she replied to a question from a woman of a fourteen year old boy about how to...
The moon has cast a spell over the human race since the time when we could look up and observe its haunting face shining in the night sky. Shifting, changing, waxing, waning, luminous with a beauty which pierces the heart, it has...
The decrees and canons of the Provincial and Ecumenical Councils today often sound odd in our modern ears—the Council Fathers were so zealous, serious, intent, and well, intolerant. The Council of Gangra, for example, dealing with a...
I sometimes cannot help asking myself three liturgical questions whenever I visit churches which serve the Liturgy in the “classic” pattern I learned in seminary—all of those questions quite rhetorical. I would like to share them here in...
