When they are in fashion, fads are never recognized as fads. Those under their influence and promoting them feel that they have come across An Important New Truth, or (if Orthodox) An Important But Neglected Part of Our Tradition....
The Sunday before the feast of Theophany is dedicated to the work of John the Baptist (or St. John the Forerunner, to give him his liturgical title). To appreciate him fully, we need to place him in his historical context, and realize...
Every Sunday our little parish serves an abbreviated Matins service before the Divine Liturgy, and part of that service contains a hymn called an “Exaposteilarion” or “Song of Light”. In the Sunday Matins, it consists of a brief...
With an admitted abundance of irony, I find myself phobic about the use of any word that ends in “phobic”, largely because the word is usually used to shut down sensible sustained debate, and functions as a kind of rhetorical club in the...
As you may or may not be surprised to learn, Santa Claus is an American. That is, he was born on American soil in 1823 and his poetic father was Mr. Clement Clarke Moore, who in that year published a poem (anonymously) entitled, “A Visit...
I am doomed, I think, never to become a trend-setter, because culturally I never seem to discover the latest trend until it has been around for a while and starts to become Yesterday’s News. Thus I have lately discovered the popularity...
There are three Hebrew words which the first century church used often in their worship, and we have retained only two of them. These Hebrew/ Aramaic words were so important that they were carried bodily and untranslated into the worship...
I was born and raised in the greater Toronto area (known to the natives there as “the GTA”), and came to faith in the early 70’s. For the students of ancient history among us, that was the time of the so-called “Jesus Movement”, when...
Recently the news has been full of the story of a Roman Catholic monsignor, Krzysztof Charamsa of Poland, the Adjunct Secretary of the Doctrine for the Congregation of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reverend Charamsa was a...
Part of the Law of Moses forbids moving the boundary marker. It reads, “In the inheritance which you will hold in the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess, you shall not move your neighbour’s boundary marker which men of old...
Our Lord’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man is unique among the parables, for in this parable alone one of the characters has a name. The parable begins, “There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted...
I spent a lot of the Divine Liturgy this last Sunday looking at a woman’s face. The woman was St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, and I was looking at her face because one of the faithful had brought her icon to church for me to bless, and...
My guess is that nothing can stop Orthodox conversation and divide a room quite so fast as someone loudly asking the question, “How ecumenical are you?” If ever I was asked the question, I think that I would feel compelled to answer the...
Of late my computer has been helping me out with my spelling rather a lot. In particular, whenever I try to write to someone about “prosphora”, it assumes I meant to type “phosphate” and autocorrects me as a type. If I am not careful, I...
A great gulf separates those who read the Scriptures over the shoulders of the Fathers and those who read over the shoulders of modern secular academics. The former are open to the possibility that the ancient worldview might have...
