Ξένες γλώσσες

In former times, a person’s relationship with the Church declared that the Church is life and its way is also the way of life. This is why, when people sinned, what did the spiritual guide give them as penance? The penance was not to take communion (Who would worry about that today? They might even be ironic abut it ‘I don’t take communion anyway. Once a year. If you tell me not to take communion, that’s no big deal. Next year. If everything goes all right, I’ll be back next year). Do you see how the deterioration starts? To be a Christian used to mean celebrating the Resurrection every Sunday, people went to the Eucharist and took part in the ...

 If people believe in Christ, read the Gospel, but don’t want to belong to the Church, aren’t they still good Christians? No! Being Christian doesn’t mean that we believe some things theoretically, but rather that we live in the Church. Florovsky puts this very well, and we quote him here: ‘Christianity from the very beginning existed as a corporate reality, as a community. To be Christian meant just to belong to the community. Nobody could be Christian by himself, as an isolated individual, but only together with "the brethren," in a "togetherness" with them. Unus Christianus—nullus Christianus. Personal conviction or even a rule of life still do not make one a Christian. Christian existence presumes and implies an incorporation, ...

This paper deals with the issue of our exposure to environmental pollution, in particular involuntary exposure, that is against our will. The issue is serious, since it affects not only the elderly but even the unsuspecting embryo – and the exposure of such embryos to substances which have come into contact with the mother, again often without her permission. The human body is a comprehensive system indissolubly linked to the air of the atmosphere, the earth and water. From as early as the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece, there were studies which focused on the effects on human health of factors such as water, the air, nutrition and changes in the climate.  Hippocrates, for example, who conducted a great many ...

Pride is a wide-open window out of which all the virtues and good works are blown. Nothing makes us so empty towards people and so unworthy before God as pride.

Very often it's the parents, particularly the mother, who reprimand children for misbehavior and shout at them quite unfairly. Then they're wounded. Even if you don't chastise them visibly but you feel it inside yourself, and you're frustrated or look at them angrily, they'll realize. Then they won't accept affection, because it'll seem hypocritical, because they've been hurt.

When he mentions implantation, however, Fr. Harakas is now speaking of something which is already conceived and growing as it travels down the fallopian tube to the uterus. For a better understanding, it is necessary to know something about both conception and implantation — what they are and what part they play in the developing child. In their book, From Conception to Birth, The Drama of Life’s Beginnings, Roberts Rugh and Dr. Landrum B. Shettles give a brief overview of the miracle of conception and its immediate aftermath:26 The sperm cell has an average life of about 48 hours inside the female tract. If it has not found and fertilized an ovum by then, it will die... ...the unfertilized ovum lives ...

A startling articulation of such a reality, scandalously challenging to the compromised intellect, can be found in the texts of the Fathers of the Church, whose restrained voice seems to be lost among the certainties and self-sufficiency - self-satisfaction, why not-  of the authoritative and institutional patterns of the present. Where bombast and the virtual reality of life, which has been promoted in order to save the structure of the historical transgressions of the past, blatantly ignore that «the Word became flesh and dwelt among us». The scavenger of this forgotten truth, the poet Yorgos Themelis, from Thessaloniki, takes and poetically transforms this «humanism, that is the Theocentrism of the consciousness of the body of the Church and confesses disarmingly: ‘Without ...

Those who put on Christ take the strength from him to cleanse themselves and become like him in purity.

Every Easter Divine Liturgy is, without doubt, unique. But the one celebrated in 194, in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau stands out as special in the history of the human race. Just a few days after their liberation by the US Army, on 29 April 1945) hundreds of Orthodox Christian prisoners in the camp gathered to celebrate a very different Easter. The Dachau concentration camp started functioning in 1933, in a former gunpowder factory. The first prisoners were political opponents of Adolf Hitler, who had become Chancellor of Germany earlier that year. Over the course of its twelve years of existence more than 200,000 prisoners were transported to the camp. Most of them were Christians, of all denominations, both clergy ...

Love as ‘acconmodation’ in the body of Christ, in the ‘land of the living’ is an eschatological experience, the experience of the last things. The last things aren’t something that’s limited to the end, but they’re the ‘final’, the ‘unshakeable’ things . Here, the end isn’t some historical time, but eternity, which isn’t limited in terms of time, but which penetrates and transcends time and history. It’s liberation from the exigencies of time and history. Love resurrects and liberates, whereas hatred subjects and vitiates. God is love . And each person has been created ‘in the image and likeness’ of the God of love. But the God of love is also just. He respects our freedom and doesn’t prioritize His power ...

On the solemn anniversary of the Dormition of the ever-remembered Elder Filotheos Zervakos, we publish an unimpeachable testimony to his charismatic presence. Saturday, 6 February. A visit from Mr. Papasteriadis. He was very concerned about a shadow on one of my lungs. He meant that, as things were, he couldn’t undertake my case. After he left, I thought: ‘It seems that the doctors have done what they can; for anything else I have to depend on God’s grace. Give me my stole and the cross with the portion of the Holy Tree. Lord, no-one makes intercession on their own behalf, but I’m alone and I’ll do it’. I hold Fr. Filotheos’ undershirt against my chest and make a short entreaty for ...

The Church is Christ’s way of life. But we think of the Church as the Patriarch, the Archbishop, the Bishop and each priest. And at the same time we think of ourselves as being outside the Church, with the ability to judge everyone. It’s a lot easier this way. With this outlook, we don’t feel that we’re members of the body of the Church. This is a fundamental mistake. This is what it all starts from. The teaching of the Church is that it is one body, the head of which is Christ and everyone else is a member and part of the same flock of Christ. Saint John Chrysostom says that the distinction between shepherds and sheep is one for ...

We knew nothing about this New Martyr Saint until January 3 1950, when he revealed the location of his burial, at the ancient Monastery of the Annunciation, in Pendelis, in Nea Makri, Attica. Since 1965, the Saint has appeared often to nuns in the monastery or to pilgrims, either in their sleep or directly before them, surrounded by a brilliant light and exuding a most sweet fragrance. He tells them details, which are remarkably consistent in all the different accounts, about his life and the conditions of his martyrdom. Saint Efraim became a monk at the age of fourteen, in a monastery which was flourishing at that time. After thirty years of living the ascetic life, he was arrested by the ...

We do well if we don't comply with sinful thoughts, which come from the devil. Because the evil spirit is able to exercise effective influence only over impassioned people. If you're without passions, he can try to get at you only from afar.