The year 1453 marked a very significant event in the life of the Orthodox Church, for that was the year that the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, effectively bringing to an end the long thousand year reign of the Christian Roman Empire (also known as “Byzantium”).  Of course […]

At the recent March for Life in Washington, D.C. one person gave a speech.  In it he said, “We affirm the gift and sanctity of life—all life, born and unborn.  As Christians we confess that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God.  Every life is […]

I have just finished reading a very important and immensely depressing book about the autocephaly of the OCA entitled, The Time Has Come: Debates over the OCA Autocephaly Reflected in St. Vladimir’s Quarterly. It is an important book because it offers so many insights about the OCA’s autocephaly and church […]

I begin with a quote from an article that is almost 60 years old, but which has lost none of its timeliness:   “Since the Byzantine era, Orthodoxy was always brought to and accepted by whole nations.  The only familiar pattern of the past, therefore, is not the creation of mere […]

The Great Prokeimenon, sometimes chanted at Vespers in the Orthodox liturgical tradition, asks the rhetorical question, “Who is so great a God as our God?” I often think that by “great” one might also mean “gutsy”. The gods of other nations and religions are comparatively tame and timid when set […]

Second Temple Judaism was a many-splendoured thing.  That is, it included many different elements—so many elements in fact that some people talk not just of Judaism, but Judaisms (in the plural). While the use of the plural might be a bit of a stretch, there is no denying that Second […]

Recently I read an article on 1 Peter 3:1-7, which passage contained advice to Christian women married to non-Christians. In this passage the apostolic author counselled the women to “be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the Word they may be […]

This last Monday Canada had (or rather “endured”) another federal election. It was called in the midst of a pandemic and at a time when the country was badly divided. Given this, feelings have been running high all over, and the Church is caught in the midst of it. This […]

Jezebel was not a nice lady. She had many faults—she was an idolater, a tyrant, a schemer, a murderer. Oddly enough, however, perhaps the one fault she did not have was the one with which her name was to become synonymous—that of being a painted, sexually immoral temptress. Jezebel was […]

I was told once that it is possible when flying an airplane to lose track of whether you are flying rightside-up or upside-down—presumably because when you can’t see the ground or are flying through clouds or fog, you lose track of everything. It was then, I was further told, that […]

It is fair to say that many people react negatively to the word “hierarchy”. The allergic reaction to the word has deep roots, going back to the Reformation and the secularism of the Enlightenment. Protestants of the sixteenth century tended to identify hierarchs with the distant and pompous prelates of […]