Author: Fr. Stephen
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Building God’s Temple
I stumbled into a conversation recently in which I heard, “Well, they say that the people are the Church, while the building is just a building.” I hesitated and mumbled something that indicated some level of disagreement. I could have said (should have said), “The building is a sacrament – it matters.” In a neighboring…
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An Illegal Christmas
The great advantage to thinking about God in legal terms, is that nothing has to change. If what happens between us and God is entirely external, a matter of arranging things such as the avoidance of eternal punishment or the enjoyment of eternal reward, then the world can go on as it is. In the…
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Living with a Calendar
The human relationship with time is a strange thing. The upright stones of neo-lithic human communities stand as silent reminders of our long interest in seasons and the movement of the heavens. Today our light-polluted skies shield many of us from the brilliant display of the night sky and rob us of the stars. The…
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God’s Tattoos
Call me a Boomer. Among the more surprising developments across my nearly seven decades of life is the now widespread practice of tattooing. As a child in the 50’s, the only tattoos I ever saw were on the occasional sailor, and we rarely saw many of them. Indeed, I don’t think there was a tattoo…
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History’s Detectives
The search for the historical anything is an exercise in fantasy and imagination, a good movie, but not good for much else. C.S. Lewis noted that reviewers of his books, speculating on how they were written and other such intimate historical matters, were almost universally wrong. He wondered out loud why we should presume historical…
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An Avalanche of Kindness
A chance conversation with my wife opened a world of wonder for me recently. I mentioned to her that, as I reaching for a scarf before my walk on a chilly morning, my thoughts drifted to a woman (a parishioner, now deceased) who had knitted several items for me. As I remembered her, I prayed…
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Worshipping a Weak and Foolish God
I cannot begin to measure the amount of time I have spent over the years in conversations about the “problem of evil.” That problem, in short, is the impossibility of reconciling an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God with the presence of suffering, injustice, and evil in the world. Those conversations often involve listening to a deeply…
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Me and My Bible
How do you feel about the Scriptures? What thoughts come to you as you read? Do they comfort you or challenge you? Do you love them or wrestle with them? Does God speak to you in them or are they opaque and bothersome? My primary relationship with the Scriptures as I was growing up was…
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The Wisdom of Man and the Foolishness of God
The Feast of the Nativity, known sometimes in Orthodoxy as “the Winter Pascha,” is one of the great examples in the story of our salvation where the “foolishness of God” defeats the wisdom of man. It is not the story of an underdog defeating the mighty, but a revelation of who God is, and who…
Thanks for the correction Simon. My mistake. Still learning.