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Christ and the Social Problem

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, December 13, 2017 † Archimandrite Georgios Kapsanis, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Gregoriou The more that people are cleansed of the passions, the greater their capacity for real communion with God and other people. Those who take a romantic and external view of the human person transfer wickedness from the person onto society, which is why they proclaim that any improvement in society will bring with it an improvement in

Seeing and Believing – A Noetic Life Part 2

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, September 2, 2016  “I see what you mean.” Language holds many secrets that we ignore. Some of the secrets are quite old. If we pay proper attention, we are able to discover things that we already know, but did not yet know that we knew. The phrase, “Now I see,” or other various uses of “seeing” as a form of “knowing,” is quite ancient in its insight. The Greek word for

The Three Saints of Pain and Hope

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, November 29, 2017 Dr. Nikolaos Koios, Content Coach of Pemptousia It’s a profound conviction of the Orthodox Church that every epoch has its own saints and there’s not a single age without them. In every era, the saints are proof and demonstration of the grace of Christ, the love of the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit, in place and time, among us. When saints leave this earth for their

Rest for Your Soul

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, December 31, 2016  If…then… Among the most alluring ideas in our lives are the notions of cause and effect, performance and award. Nothing seems more soothing than the simple promise that doing one thing leads to the reward of the other. It is predictable, subject to control, clearly delineates the rules of reward and punishment and makes obvious who deserves what. Nothing could be neater. The limit to this idea comes

Ex Nihilo (1)

By Fr John Breck, February 1, 2022 In the very beginning, there was nothing. Nothing at all. There was neither time nor space, neither matter nor energy, neither life nor death. There were no galaxies, no stars or planets; nor were there molecules, atoms, or any of the vast array of subatomic particles that constitute physical reality as we know it. There was nothing. The concept of “nothingness” is impossible for us to grasp. “Nothingness”

Beneath Her Compassion

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, November 19, 2016  Among the greater mysteries of the New Testament are those surrounding the Mother of God. A large segment of modern Christianity has become tone deaf in this regard, a result of centuries of antagonism towards certain aspects of older tradition. It is a deafness that grieves my heart, primarily in that it represents a great gulf within the broader experience of the faith. A few years after my

Saint Paraskevi—We are Healed When We Reach Out to Christ

Published by Fr. Stavros Akrotirianakis, July 25, 2018 A great crowd followed Him and thronged about Him. And there was a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus, and came up behind Him in the crowd and touched His garment. For she

A Terrible Knowledge

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, December 7, 2016  Greek Mythology made the curiosity of Pandora the primary cause of suffering in the world. She fails to resist the lure of finding out what is in a box she is told to leave closed. Opening the box, she unleashes sorrow and suffering into the world. We humans are a curious lot. We want to know everything about our business and much about what is not our business.

The Hand in the Gospel

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, July 18, 2016  My desk sits looking out of a wall of windows. My small backyard is shaded by a lush green this time of year. At any time of day or night, nature sounds mark the movement of the sun as much as the shifting shadows: birds in the early morning give way to katydids as the sun moves up the sky, succeeded by the drone of frogs as night

People as Liturgical Beings, Part 2

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, October 23, 2014 By Abbot George Kapsanis of Gregoriou People who offer ‘your own from your own, in all things and for all things’ serve God truly and pleasingly. That is, people who recognize that whatever they have is a gift from God. They believe that they’ve got nothing of their own to offer. Everything’s from God and they take from that and offer it to God, together with themselves, their world