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The Communion of Friends
Read more: The Communion of FriendsYou meet someone and like them. You slowly get to know them. Conversation and sharing, listening and learning, a picture or a reality begin to emerge. You think about them when they’re away. You’re aware that you matter to them as well. The thought of anything hurting them is painful. This is friendship. We easily reduce […]
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The One Mediator – And the Sacraments
Read more: The One Mediator – And the SacramentsFor there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, (1 Tim. 2:5) There is no way to adequately explain priesthood without reference to mediation. A priest is a mediator between God and Man. From time to time over the years, I have had the verse from 1 Timothy […]
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The End of the Sacraments – The End of All Things
Read more: The End of the Sacraments – The End of All ThingsThe holidays bring a bit of my family together – for fun and conversation and the joy of a feast. The conversations, however, can serve as a reminder of what I don’t know. Two of my adult children are deep into the world of computers: one is a software engineer, the other a web-designer (among […]
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The Final Destruction of Demons – Holy Baptism
Read more: The Final Destruction of Demons – Holy Baptism“Final” is not a word you often hear in Christian teaching. Most Christians leave the final things until, well, the End. But this is not the language of the fathers nor of the Church. A good illustration can be found in the Orthodox service of Holy Baptism. During the blessing of the waters the priest […]
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Providence – God in Extension
Read more: Providence – God in ExtensionThere are aspects of the Orthodox faith that require that we reach beyond what we think we know and dig more deeply into the writings of the Fathers. This is particularly the case when Orthodoxy uses similar language to Western theological models. We see a word (in this case, “providence,”) and think we know what […]
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The Gospel of Progress – and the New Jerusalem
Read more: The Gospel of Progress – and the New JerusalemAmerican fans of Monty Python will be familiar with the opening lines of William Blake’s poem, “Jerusalem” (and I apologize to my British readers for such an introduction). The poem was set to music in 1916 and became deeply popular in post-war Britain. The Labour Party adopted it as a theme for the election of […]
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A Virgin Gave Birth
Read more: A Virgin Gave BirthI was browsing through some online material recently and came across a conversation between a non-believing sceptic and a Christian apologist. The question was asked (right off the top): “Why a virgin birth?” The apologist did a decent job of responding, giving a fairly common explanation of “why Christ had to be born of a […]
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The Child Who Came Among Us
Read more: The Child Who Came Among UsFew things seem as confusing to our culture as the feast of Christmas. For many, it is the great feast of sentimentality. As such, it is our culture’s feast of feeling. We want to have the “spirit of Christmas.” It is identified with snow, with trees, with family, with giving and receiving of gifts. It […]
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Have a Dickens of a Christmas
Read more: Have a Dickens of a ChristmasIn the late 1600’s in colonial Boston, the celebration of Christmas was against the law. Indeed, anyone evidencing the “spirit of Christmas” could be fined five shillings. In the early 1800’s, Christmas was better known as a season for rioting in the streets and civil unrest. However, in the mid-1800’s some interesting things changed the […]
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The Christmas When Everybody Was There
Read more: The Christmas When Everybody Was ThereThe soldiers were scattered across Europe with the loneliness of war. The world was caught up in a total struggle. Women had gone to the factories; children were collecting scrap metal. The “war effort” was universal. In many places, food was rationed. The madhouse of consumption belonged only to the war; everything else could wait. […]
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“Perhaps others can share their experiences of this [sacramental perception].” Thank you, Father. I find a helpful analogy between the…
Thanks SO much Fr. Stephen. I still have a lot of bad theology in my DNA.
Matthew, An example: the parable of the Sheep and Goats. I follow the lead of Sergius Bulgakov (and others, I’m…
How do you deal with those difficult parables Fr. Stephen?
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Matthew, I sympathize with having bad theology in my DNA! For long time I had the image of God’s “just”…