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December 2012, Christianity Today magazine graciously provided a forum for me to answer a question I posed in the title of my article: “Will the twenty-first be the Orthodox century?” I answered, “Yes. The twenty-first will likely be a century that witnesses a theological rebirth of the Orthodox vision within Protestantism, regardless of whether or not the Orthodox Church itself grows numerically.” I explained the ways in which mainline and evangelical Christians are retrieving the Great Tradition of our Church as a resource for reconstruction and renewal. I documented evidence for the rise of a new kind of ecumenism that is basing itself on a revival of the ancient approach to worship and theological decision-making. However, there was one very important ...

And further down the line, the return of doubting Thomas. No sooner had the reading finished than, suddenly, the bells started pealing mightily and at the same moment joyful shots were fired out in the courtyard. The monastery guards, in their kilts, were firing to the glory of God. Everything then quietened down for a minute or two: no bells, no shots, no shouts, no chanting… Everything became still all at once… Then within this sudden cessation of all the noise, there came, from within the church itself, from somewhere in its depths, a strange sound I’d never heard before, a very pleasant tinkling… metallic, but at the same time resembling large drops of water falling like notes of music… It ...

Don’t neglect to root out from the hearts of your children the seeds of sin, wickedness, blasphemous thoughts, sinful habits and tendencies and every other passion. The seeds of all evil are present in children and, as they grow up, these flourish and take root, and then have the predictable harvest.

The matter of the creation of the world is, in itself, a field where the religious and scientific views of the world meet. Any investigation of this ‘world-shattering event’ would certainly involve pausing to remark on the dynamic which is evolving in the ranks of the scientific community. Ideas come and go, arriving and departing, and all the time constantly being tested against observable data. This dimension is of importance when the scientific view is contrasted with the religious concept of creation. The religious concept appears to be static and well-established in sacred texts, which were written when an entirely different world-view prevailed, and in social environments with a completely different educational composition from our own. Photo by Dimitris Iliopoulos Very ...

How easily we Orthodox indiscriminately adopt the language of Western theology! It is always a great temptation for those who have converted to Orthodoxy from Western Christian denominations to bring the baggage of their former allegiances with them rather than embrace Orthodoxy as something which is entirely different from the Christianity they left behind. While they may see the Western Christendom of today as alien to the Church of the Fathers, they are sometimes reluctant to accept that not everything from the pre-schism West is part and parcel of Orthodoxy. And yet, the influence of Western theology is to be found not only amongst Orthodox converts in the West, but also among those who have been brought up in the ...

Don’t be cast down in the midst of sorrows and temptations, but with Christ’s love assuage the anger and the cantankerousness. The less patience you have, the greater your temptations seem.. And the more your grow in patience, the smaller they become and you get through them without effort, solid as a rock.

We’ve said before that God is not wrathful, bent on punishment and revenge. If He were, He would be bad. But there’s no trace of badness in the divinity. Every trial is an education from God and is a form of the spiritual struggle we have deliberately banished from our lives. In a variety of ways, the good Lord tries to bring us closer to Him. In God’s eyes we’re all fighting the good fight. Today’s economic crisis is a great trial, test and education. God is a wonderful educator. He’s trying us for our own good and for our victory. Greece has been exposed, is insecure, frightened, in turmoil. Spiritually defenceless, seduced by the good life, surfeit, hyper-consumerism, enrichment and profligate ...

Prove to God, in practice, that you’ve given yourself up to Him completely, that you’re not concerned about anything, that you accept, calmly and without complaint, whatever He sends, pleasant or otherwise, in the conviction that this has been allowed by Divine Providence. Your sole concern should be the careful observation of God’s commandments, whatever the circumstances.

C. Luther’s sermon 1. The rhetorical environment On the eve of the Reformation, at the end of the 15th century, preaching in Germany presents the following picture : a) Itinerant preachers attracted crowds of people in open-air settings to inspire them, in return for general absolution of sins, to fight against the Turks, who had conquered the Christian East and were the enemies of the Lord and His Church,. The famous orders of preachers (Dominicans, Franciscans and Augustinians) had undertaken the systematic education of these preachers. b) The sermo modernus satisfied the needs of scholasticism, but to the detriment of the Biblical text, whereas the Biblical homilia antiqua had come to be regarded as simplistic. At the time of Luther, the subject of sermons ...

Does an individual ever have the "right to die?" Must life be prolonged when there is little or no chance of its res­toration to "meaningful existence?" Is there any moral jus­tification for curtailing the life of a terminally-ill patient in order to free him from unbearable suffering? These ques­tions, punctuated by the much-publicized and controver­sial Karen Ann Quinlan case, are becoming increasingly important as we strive to enhance not only the quantity but the quality of human life. They concern a very real problem faced by our own Orthodox Christian clergy and laity alike in dealing with acutely and terminally-ill pa­tients. We therefore ask, "What is the stance of the Ortho­dox Church concerning mercy-killing or euthanasia?" And "to what extent ...

Do whatever you have to in order to experience Him and bring Him into your heart. So He can soften your heart with the touch of grace, every time you recall how much God loves you and how He’s protected you from spiritual death, keeping you safe from the filth that the demons bring into people’s minds.

Saint John Cassian was born c. 360, probably in Scythia Minor, now Dobruja in modern-day Romania and Bulgaria. He died in 435 in Marseilles. His feast day as a saint of the Eastern Orthodox Churches is celebrated on February 29, a date assigned also in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church. The Roman Catholic Church also celebrates him as a saint on July 23.  “I shall speak first about control of the stomach, the opposite to gluttony, and about how to fast and what and how much to eat. I shall say nothing on my own account, but only what I have received from the Holy Fathers. They have not given us only a single rule for fasting or a ...

The grief and the tears of the Saints came from their profound feelings of love for God. The Saints experienced the presence of God all the time and this increased their joy accordingly. At the same time, however, they saw to the needs of others, grieving over those who’d sinned and helping them to start their repentance and reformation.

1. After God, man is, without a doubt, the most mysterious and enigmatic entity in all the realms of human thought. At the bottomless depth of human existence there whirl contradictions which defy recon­ciliation: life and death, virtue and evil, God and devil, and all that exists in and around them.  Through all its religions, philosophies, sciences, spiritual and materi­alistic civilizations, the human race has been trying to solve essentially one problem, one all-encompassing problem: the problem of man. And from all these exertions and struggles it has fashioned for itself one supreme godhead, to be worshipped as the highest value and the foremost criterion.  That ultimate godhead is "Man is the measure of everything." That is to say, man is ...

According to the spiritual judgement of our Fathers, all human activity derives from the mind. This is where an image is made of every notion, which then, gradually, proceeds to its practical application. The misuse or abuse of things follows the wrong use of concepts. Repentance in the real sense means the mind’s return to its former position, where the proper order of things is to be found. In our own times, however, repentance is taken more to mean asking forgiveness of God for our transgressions.

The Protaton, the Monastery of Vatopedi and the Cretan School The Holy Mountain has been the great centre of Orthodox art since the fall of Constantinople. But art flourished on Mount Athos much earlier than that, as is shown by some icons and miniatures that have survived the severe vicissitudes through which the Holy Mountain has passed. Of the older iconographic works, there are the remains of the mosaics in the katholikon1 of the Monastery of Vatopedi. They comprise the following: Christ on a throne flanked on either side by the Holy Virgin and Saint John the Baptist, situated above the central door of the narthex, with an inscription of the eleventh century; the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin, on the wall of ...

It may well be that I don’t have good taste and that I don’t understand much about art, but this was my impression and I share it most sincerely with my readers. This beautiful iconostas is a gift from the late Abbot, Antonij Bochkov (a former merchant), who spent his last years as a monk near Moscow, at the Monastery of Nikolo-Ugreshkij . Apart from the iconostas, there’s not much in the empty, spacious chapel of the Pokrov (Protecting Veil) which makes an impression in terms of the feast or ceremony (I don’t, of course, mean the service itself: the scrupulous order of the monks on the Holy Mountain is exemplary and I haven’t seen anything like it either in the churches ...