Category: Orthodox Christianity
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Single in the City
I’ve been in London the past two days, as we are making our way to the Holy Land. London is a marvelous city, one of my favorites. It is quite English, very international and increasingly Euro. Like many places in Europe, secularism is far more advanced than in America (or America expresses its secularism in…
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Scattered Thoughts Revisited
We have noticed with sadness that nowadays men suffer dreadfully because their mind is fragmented. Imagination, which is only one of the mind’s activities, is overindulged and dominates men’s lives, leading some to hardness of heart due to pride, and others to mental illness. According to the teaching of the Gospel and the Scriptures, the…
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In the Great Sweep of History
“The Great Sweep of History” is an event that occurs in the rear-view mirror, easily characterized in various fashions as we choose to label certain events as important and certain event as without significance. I believe that for the Christian there is no great sweep of history and that the temptation to view history in…
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I Have Set My Face To Go To Jerusalem
This Thursday, my wife and I, two parishioners and their son, will be traveling towards the Holy Land. We make connections on Sunday in Tel Aviv with a group of pilgrims, mostly Orthodox, led by Met. Kallistos Ware. We will spend two weeks in the Holy Land, meet with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and generally…
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Deliver Us From the Evil One
The following words of St. Silouan are fairly straightforward. God give us grace and good hearts to hear him. If you think evil of people, it means you have an evil spirit in you whispering evil thoughts about others. And if a man dies without repenting, without having forgiven his brother, his soul will go…
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Prayers By the Lake XCV – Children and Saints
XCV Children and saints cling to You, O Lord, the rest rebel against You. Children and saints are the boundary between the Kingdom of existence and the shadow of nonexistence.1 Guardians call themselves parents and cast Your children off crags into chasms. Guardians presume that they are parents, and so they…
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Raising A Saint
Most of us would be satisfied to raise children who remain faithful believers. It is not always an easy thing and every parent who has such a child should rejoice constantly. There is no method to raise a child to be a saint, for God alone gives the grace that results in the mystery of…
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Pray for the Gulf Coast
I have a daughter and her husband (Khouria Kathryn and Fr. Philip Rogers) who live in Lafayette, LA. They and some other parishioners are riding out Gustav in the home of a parishioner that is “hurricane proof”. That entire area of the gulf suffered so greatly when struck by Katrina – please keep all in…
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Global Cooling
The following is a reprint of an article I published back in December. Thought I’d offer it again. The reference to “Global Cooling” is a play on Kalomiros’ description of the coldness of the modern heart. I have been listening to a tape of the talk, “The River of Fire,” given by Dr. Alexander Kalomiros…
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How Simple Should Christianity Be?
There is a tendency in our modern world to make things as simple as possible. We hide the complexities behind a keyboard (I don’t know how my computer works – or not very well) or we treat things that seem complex as unnecessary obfuscations. This same drive to simplify was very much alive in the…
Father, Dana and Matthew, I live and work in a spiritual desert. Your kindness and kind responses are a cool…