Recently I examined the assertions of a scholar, Joan E. Taylor, in her book Christians and the Holy Places: the Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, to the effect that none of the holy sites on...
On Saturday January 17 I had the pleasure of being part of an ecumenical panel and giving a response from the Orthodox perspective on a keynote address on Roman Catholic ecumenism. The year 2015 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Decree...
In the May of 2013, through the kindness and generosity of my friend and deacon Gregory Wright, I visited the holy places in Palestine, fulfilling a lifetime dream. I went there with Deacon Gregory not so much as a tourist, but as an...
Our present culture, speaking through a thousand movies, magazine articles, and television shows, takes it for granted that people will be sexually active, and that sexual activity has little or nothing to do with marriage. This activity...
There is no doubt about it—Hitler was a very bad man. According to the traditional numbers, he was responsible for the slaughter of about six million Jews in “the Holocaust”, though of course responsibility for this massacre must be...
Often we clergy are asked about the nature of evil—is evil a substance, a kind of positive negativity? Or is it the mere absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light?Strict dualists (like the ancient Zoroastrians) would say that...
In any sustained discussion regarding the progress of liberal theology in the Orthodox Church, one sooner or later encounters magical thinking. Magical thinking is defined by Wikipedia (that modern oracle) as “the attribution of causal...
If you are at all like me, it is not Christmas until you have seen the holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has been shown seasonally every year since it first appeared in 1965. I have watched it faithfully every year since I...
The battle between those who condemn homosexual activity as sinful and those who celebrate it as a valid alternative is heating up, and the sound of its fury is shaking the walls and rattling the windows even of the Orthodox Church. ...
The climax of the first part of the Divine Liturgy is the reading of the Gospel. Unlike the reading of the Epistle, we do not simply read the Gospel. When the Epistle is read the reader simply stands in the midst of the people and chants...
Lately I came across something online, a phone exchange between a man and his fiancée wherein he confronted her about her public infidelity and broke off their engagement. The whole exchange was set up and recorded by a phone-in radio...
Catastrophes come in all shapes and sizes. It came to Joni Eareckson one day on July 30, 1967. While swimming in Chesapeake Bay, young Joni dove into the water, misjudging its depth. That water was shallower than she thought, and she...
In the middle of the twentieth century, two men shared a deep friendship, based on their mutual love of Christ and belief in the Scriptures: Charles (Chuck) Templeton, and Billy Graham. Odds are you have heard of the latter; probably not...
Many people will have heard of “the Jesus Seminar”, a group of about 150 self-appointed experts gathered by their leader Robert Funk in 1985 to pronounce on the authenticity of the various sayings of Jesus. They were famous for using...
Whether it is due to the secularity of the Canadians among whom I live or whether it is a widespread North American trend, I often hear people say, “I consider myself a very spiritual person, but I don’t believe in organized religion”. I...
