By Abbot Tryphon, October 20, 2019 Creating a Christian environment in the home Creating a Christian home begins with the icon corner. The “bright corner” becomes the center for every domestic church, and where the family devotions take place. This is also the family’s way of declaring to visitors that this is a Christian home, where Christ is head. Because the husband is a sort of domestic priest (the priesthood of all believers), it is
By God’s divine power, God has given us all the things we need for life and for true devotion that allow us to know God, who has called us by God’s own glory and goodness. In this gift, God has given us a guarantee of something very great and wonderful. Through this gift, you are sharers in the divine nature itself. —2 Peter 1:3-4 Spirituality is primarily about human transformation in this life, not just salvation
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, August 3, 2015 There are many Orthodox bumper stickers and internet memes that seek to portray the excellence of Orthodoxy. Some compare us to the “marines,” others to various kinds of extreme sports. There’s the one that declares the Orthodox Church to have been founded in 33 A.D. I understand such boosterism in a culture where proclaiming the excellence of your football team or other product loyalty is seen as important.
SSCORRE! Saint Sophia Cathedral Online Resources for our Religious Edification TOPIC OF THE WEEK: “Philotimo is the reverent distillation of goodness, the love shown by humble people, from which every trace of self has been filtered out. Their hearts are full of gratitude toward God and to their fellow men, and out of spiritual sensitivity, they try to repay the slightest good which others do to them.” – Saint Paisios Adult/Family: Elder Paisios on Philotimo and Leventia“…Those who have philotimo, because they move within the heavenly sphere of doxology, joyfully accept their trials as well
By Stephen Freeman, August 1, 2015 “Person” is among the most difficult words in the classical Christian vocabulary. It is difficult on the one hand because the word has a common meaning in modern parlance that is not the same meaning as its classical one. And it is difficult on the other hand even when all of its later meanings and associations are stripped away – because what it seeks to express is simply a very
By David Bentley Hart, October 2003 The word “nihilism” has a complex history in modern philosophy, but I use it in a sense largely determined by Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom not only diagnosed modernity as nihilism, but saw Christianity as complicit in its genesis; both it seems to me were penetratingly correct in some respects, if disastrously wrong in most, and both raised questions that we Christians ignore at our peril. Nietzsche’s case
By Abbot Tryphon, October 19, 2019 The place of holy relics in the Orthodox Church Because of the revolution during the period of the Protestant Reformation, the veneration of the saints, came under attack, leading to the burning of the bodies of saints, depriving them of even a Christian burial, and thus leading to perhaps the worst sin of iconoclasm. We see a continuation of this iconoclasm demonstrated by our fear of the dead by
We are currently renovating the Cathedral bathrooms, please see the post construction progress photos below: MORE PICTURES COMING SOON! ‘
God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” —Genesis 1:26 My dear people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God. —1 John 3:2 The Judeo-Christian creation story says that we were created in the very “image and likeness” of God—who is Infinite Love flowing between Three, making unity out of clear diversity. (Picture
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, July 27, 2015 No revelation is more central to the Christian faith than God as Father. Some might immediately respond that the Trinity should be seen as the central revelation. But, in Orthodox understanding, the Trinity has its source (πηγή) in the Father. We should understand this not only as a matter of Trinitarian thought, but as the proper grounding of the spiritual life as well. To be a Christian in the proper sense, to
© 2020 Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral
