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The Dormition of the Mother of God
Read more: The Dormition of the Mother of GodIn giving birth you preserved your virginity, In falling asleep you did not forsake the world, O Theotokos. You were translated to life, O Mother of Life, And by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death. Troparion of the Feast – Tone 1 It is easy to be put off by Orthodox devotion to […]
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The Meaning of Words – Part 2
Read more: The Meaning of Words – Part 2I have taken this discussion of life in a “one-storey” universe to that of language, precisely because I think that much of our language (as we presently define it) presumes “two-storey” meanings. One of the places I will press language is our speaking of God’s Providence. In the “Morning Prayer of the Last Elders of […]
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Worth Taking Time to Read
Read more: Worth Taking Time to ReadI confess I do not read near as much as I once did. Writing takes time – and is a way of slowly digesting a lot of years of reading – and, I hope, to some benefit. Today, however, I came across an article of Frederica Mathewes-Green, written last June, that was deeply moving. I […]
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What Do Words Mean in a One-Storey Universe?
Read more: What Do Words Mean in a One-Storey Universe?It seems to me that much of our religious vocabulary, defined many times within the past 500 years, is enculturated to speak a two-storey world (see the previous post for an explanation of two-storey world). Words such as “faith,” “believe,” and their relatives belong somehow to a portion of the world that is not first-storey. […]
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Death in a Two-Storey Universe
Read more: Death in a Two-Storey UniverseI have written before about the two-storey universe that is part of our cultural inheritance in the modern world. I have noted that the default position of our culture is secular protestantism. I have explained that I mean not that we do not believe in God, but that in our dominant cultural metaphor the God […]
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More on the Mystery of Salvation
Read more: More on the Mystery of SalvationI am almost always caught off guard by the number of readers an article on very simple (from an Orthodox point of view) matter of our salvation seems to generate. I forget that the treasury of doctrine that we live in is not part of the daily treasure that others know. I find tremendous comfort, […]
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The Mystery of Salvation
Read more: The Mystery of SalvationThere is a song I recall from my childhood – sung by John Hartford – in which the operative phrase is, “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been there…” It runs the permutations on life’s possibilities. One thing leads to another. It is this connectedness that always seems to trump the power of choice […]
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Akathist Hymn: Glory to God for All Things
Read more: Akathist Hymn: Glory to God for All ThingsI have seen several translations of this hymn. This one comes from the site of St. John the Baptist Cathedral (ROCOR) in Washington, D.C. I have edited it only typographically. It was composed by Metropolitan Tryphon (Prince Boris Petrovich Turkestanov) +1934 – but frequently attributed to Father Gregory Petrov, who died in a Soviet prison […]
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Finding the Problems at Home – Its All in Your Mind
Read more: Finding the Problems at Home – Its All in Your MindIf you like history (as I do) then there is always a temptation to look to history for answers. It is certainly the case that the present has much of its situation from the givens it inherited in its history. But we are none us completely explained by our forebears. I certainly have aspects inherited […]
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Theology, the Slavophiles, and the Parish Church
Read more: Theology, the Slavophiles, and the Parish ChurchIvan Kireevsky was born on April 3, 1806, and became in the course of his lifetime one of the leading intellectual forces in the group who would later be called the Slavophiles. They were interested in a revival in Russian thought, particularly along lines they considered distinctly Russian – in comparison to Western thought. Many […]
It was a wonderful day. Although I was not able to attend the evening-into-the-early-morning Pascha service at our Greek Orthodox…