~By Father Stephen Freeman, May 3, 2023 I love taking “deep dives” into history – going beyond survey material and making my way through pages and pages of boring detail. I can’t do it every day, nor even often. But it helps fill in detail that is often glossed over in broad treatments. My most recent foray has been into a book entitled Slaves in Greece and Rome (by Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat, 2006). It’s easy
~Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis I was in the Evangelismos Hospital. I was concerned about my soul’s unreadiness. When my spiritual guide (the late Elder Epifanios Theodoropoulos) visited me, I said: ‘I’m praying that God will give me a few more years of life, so that I can repent’. He answered: ‘You don’t need years, repentance is like lightning (K. Yiannitsiotis, Κοντά στον Γέροντα Πορφύριο [Close to Elder Porfyrios]. The late author had a close relationship with Saint Porfyrios-
Apostle Bartholomew of the Twelve The Holy Apostle Bartholomew was born at Cana of Galilee and was one of the Twelve Apostles of Christ. After the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, it fell by lot to the holy Apostles Bartholomew and Philip (November 14) to preach the Gospel in Syria and Asia Minor. In their preaching they wandered through various cities, and then met up again. Accompanying the holy Apostle
Sermon preached on Sunday, July 24, 2022 by Fr. Antony Hughes Light is a major theme in the Gospels as we know. Another theme connected to it is the ability or inability to see the light. It is true that not everyone can see it. In Mt. 6 Jesus develops this theme for us. “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light.
On the day after every Great Feast, the Orthodox Church honors the one through whom the Feast is made possible. On the day following the Nativity of the Lord, for example, we celebrate the Synaxis of the Most Holy Theotokos (December 26). On the day after Theophany, we commemorate St John the Baptist (January 7), and so on. Today we honor the all-Holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, Who descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost in
By Father Thomas Hopko In the Old Testament, Pentecost was the feast which occurred fifty days after Passover. As the Passover feast celebrated the exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt, so Pentecost celebrated God’s gift of the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. In the new covenant of the Messiah, the Passover event takes on its new meaning as the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, the “exodus” of men from
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 21, 2021 Pascha (Easter) comes with a great note of joy in the Christian world. Christ is risen from the dead and our hearts rejoice. That joy begins to wane as the days pass. Our lives settle back down to the mundane tasks at hand. After 40 days, the Church marks the Feast of the Ascension, often attended by only a handful of the faithful (Rome has more-or-less moved the
~By Stephen Freeman, May 17, 2023 As verbal beings, we live in a world of icons. We experience the world in an iconic fashion. A major difficulty for us is that we have lost the vocabulary of iconic reality. We have substituted the language of photography. The dissonance between reality and our photographic assumptions has led us to doubt both. Man is an iconographer and needs to re-learn what that means. +++ Franz Kafka famously
~Elder Moisis the Athonite † We’ve said before that God isn’t impassioned, punitive or vindictive. If he were so, he’d have to be evil. But there’s not a trace of wickedness in the divinity. Every trial’s a divine lesson and a form of asceticism, which we’ve otherwise voluntarily removed from our lives. Our loving God tries in a variety of ways to bring us close to him. Before God, we’re all strivers. Today’s economic crisis
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, February 6, 2022 No one is “outside” of God, nor can be. Olivier Clement writes that “not one blade of grass grows outside the Church.” The Syro-Phoenician Woman was outside the Jewish fold, yes, but that did not mean she was disconnected from God. Jesus calls her a woman of great faith. Therefore, she must have been very connected with God indeed for all good things, like
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