5 Οκτωβρίου 2017

Those who belong to the Church of Christ belong to the truth, and those who don’t belong to the truth don’t belong to the Church of Christ. People who are very tall and those who are very short are both just as far away from the stars.

The faithful who cheerfully shoulder their Cross are the basis of a well-regulated state, one which builds its progress on Christian morality, selfless love, active hope, harmony and mutual understanding. Cross-bearing Christians are the bulwark against the moral and economic crisis in our society. The moral decline of people who don’t shoulder their cross gladly and patiently has brought about today’s economic crisis, which, nevertheless, is ‘the disciplinarian to bring us to Christ’ (Gal. 3, 24), because it brings us close to Him, because it forces us to rein in our excessive demands and to increase our trust in Him. The economic crisis teaches us to abandon extroversion and to concentrate on full knowledge of our self, this unknown quantity ...

c. The word of God, the Mysteries and sacramentalism. The correct understanding of “mystery” was always the touchstone of Christian teaching and life – not only in the early Christian community, when the Church contended with an assortment of mystery cults, but also much later, when an exclusively scholastic theology developed (in both the West, and the East) a sacramentalistic view of the Christian mysteries. It is worth remembering that the crux of that theological conflict during the Reformation was a sacramentalistic view of the Holy Eucharist, which tragically ended in the complete departure of Protestant theology from the original mysteriology of the undivided Church. The dialectical antithesis between “sacramentalism” (which dominated pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic theology, but also some ...

Both eastern and western Christians, on first hearing of Western Orthodoxy, often ask such questions as “Who are these people?” or “Why haven’t I heard of them before?” Source: /www.allsaints-stl.org/ First, who are Western Orthodox Christians? Simply, they are those Christians of the West who have discovered the truth of Orthodoxy and who have embraced the Orthodox faith and now worship and practice their Orthodox faith according to the venerable and ancient traditions of the West – traditions whose roots go back to that time when the Western Church was still fully Orthodox. Many westerners who have embraced Orthodoxy have known it only in its eastern forms, primarily because these have been the predominantly visible forms of Orthodoxy in the West. Particularly ...

The April 2 edition of Newsweek Magazine featured a piece (just in time for Western Easter) by journalist Andrew Sullivan.  It is a heartfelt piece, urging its readers to ignore (i.e. reject) all forms of contemporary Christianity and to embrace Jesus instead.  Reading this thoughtful essay, I could not shake the feeling that Mr. Sullivan was intending his piece to be edgy and radical.  But for those whose reading is not confined to Newsweek Magazine, it was painfully apparent that Mr. Sullivan was in fact re-issuing The Same Old Thing.  Far from being new and radical in his proposal, he was trudging down a well-trodden road in the wake of many people before him.  The road even has a name, ...