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...
I would like to conclude this commentary series on the Divine Liturgy (or at least the first part of the Liturgy, the so-called “Liturgy of the Catechumens”) with a reflection on the reading of the Gospel. In the Liturgy, after the...
In the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, after the Trisagion Hymn comes the chanting of the prokeimenon and of the epistle. In many places the prokeimenon now has practically no purpose or significance, and looks like a verbal tag chanted in...
Lately a new book has become available, The Departure of the Soul, published by St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Arizona. Its full title is, The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church; a...
In the Divine Liturgy, after the antiphons, comes the Trisagion Hymn, prefaced by a prayer in which the celebrant prays that the God who is hymned by the seraphim, the cherubim, and by every angelic power in heaven, may also deign to...
One can often tell how far a heresy has spread and how much it needs the antidote of refutation by the amount of ink it gets in blog columns. I remember one young priest writing in a church magazine a piece summarizing the Church’s...
In the Divine Liturgy, after the Great Litany, come the three antiphons and their litanies/ prayers. These antiphons exist in several forms. The original Greek practice is to use psalms for the antiphons, interspersing the verses of the...
In the Divine Liturgy, after the initial doxology in which the celebrant blesses the Kingdom of God and blesses with the sign of the Cross the altar table and its antimension before using it, the assembled Church next prays the Great...
The so-called “Holy Fire” is the name given to the fire that appears on ends of the candles of the Patriarch of Jerusalem and others every Holy Saturday. The Patriarch, accompanied by a church crammed filled with others, awaits for the...
In a recent blog piece I looked at the issue of gay Orthodox Christians who embraced and celebrated their homosexuality and who were sexually active and who received Holy Communion in Orthodox churches. In this piece I would like to look...
Recently the Public Orthodoxy site has published a piece by Giacomo Sanfilippo under the title “Conjugal Friendship”. In it Sanfilippo writes, “To the question, ‘Can two persons of the same gender ‘have sex’ with each other?’ we hear...
What does the Orthodox Church think about gay sex? The official answer is not hard to find. The Orthodox Church has always condemned gay sex as sinful and as something therefore not allowed to Christians. The case of gay sex is not much...
In the 1996 edition of National Geographic magazine (paged through in a waiting room) I found an article on my old hometown of Toronto, in which a Torontonian commented on how the great urban city had changed over the years and become...
One dubious joy of publishing anything more controversial than a cookbook is that of attracting critical responses. One such critical response came lately from Dr. Paul Ladouceur, resident of Quebec, Canada, and a distinguished teacher...
