~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
~ By Metropolitan of Gortyn and Megalopolis, Ieremias † In these talks, my friends, we’re presenting in simple form the well-known work of Saint John Damaskinos (the Damascan): The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. We know that God is beyond our capacity to understand. This doesn’t mean, however, that He’s left us in complete ignorance: He’s revealed His glory to us, first in nature and then, more fully, in the sacred books of Holy
~By Father Stephen Freeman, May 22, 2023 For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” Is it oxen God is concerned about? Or does He say it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written, that he who plows should plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Cor. 9:9-10) In this odd little passage in
Introduction The seventh Sunday after the Feast of Holy Pascha is observed by the Orthodox Church as the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. This day commemorates the 318 God-bearing Fathers who gathered in Nicaea in 325 at the request of the Emperor, Saint Constantine the Great, to address the heresy of Arianism together with other issues that concerned the unity of the Church. Commemoration of The Great and Holy Feast of
~By Stephen Freeman, May 24, 2023 There are a number of ideas and phrases that most Biblically literate Christians would swear were in the Bible, but are not. Among those is the phrase (or concept) of the “debt of sin.” It is simply not there. Nor is there a phrase that describes sin as something that we “owe.” Again, it’s simply not there. The phrase, “the debt of sin,” or “sin debt” is extra-biblical. It
Jesus did not live with his disciples after his resurrection as he had before his death. Filled with the glory of his divinity, he appeared at different times and places to his people, assuring them that it was he, truly alive in his risen and glorified body. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). It
ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 24, 2020 All of us carry things that weigh us down: including beliefs and opinions, little “t” traditions that are unnecessary and burdensome, desires, sins, fears. I could name many others. We saw it in the Gospel of the Samaritan Woman last week. She held tightly to her Samaritan traditions as the Jews did to theirs. Worship here not there, there
ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! ~By Father Stephen Freeman, May 10, 2023 One of the stranger ideas that accompanied the Reformation, was the notion that miracles had ended at the time of the New Testament’s completion. Never stated as a doctrinal fact in the mainstream of Protestantism, it remained a quiet assumption, particularly when joined with an anti-Roman Catholicism in which the various visions, weeping statues, and saints’ lives were considered to be fabrications of
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