In Nazi Germany the State attempted to justify its extreme actions against Jews, Communists, Gypsies, and other dissidents by saying that Germany was fighting for its life with its back to the wall, and that these actions, though difficult, were necessary for national survival.

The myrrh-bearing women are an image of the Church. Taken together they reveal the broad catholicity of the Church, for they were a diverse lot, and included both the conventional married woman, Mary the mother of Joses, and the highly unconventional Mary Magdalene. They also reveal the primacy of devotion […]

“Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.” These words of Christ, spoken to Thomas and recorded in John 20:29, have often been misunderstood. Some suggest that Christ was offering a blessing to those who believe in Him without any evidence at all, who accept Him on blind […]

Now we are going home, our faces radiant with Pascha, the faces of those who have heard the blast of the Jubilee trumpet. Let that trumpet sound in the ears of the weary world, loud enough to wake the dead: Christ is risen!

Come away with me; let us leave our world and travel back together to the first Palm Sunday in the first century. Stepping out of our time machine, we see the bright sunshine beating down on us, the dusty road, the jostling, joyful, shouting crowds. And there, coming down the […]

In 2019 we need the church to be retro enough to withstand the incoming flood, and its leaders to fearlessly proclaim its timeless teaching regardless of the cost. We need such saints as Athanasius, who stood against the flood in his own day.

Like many pastors in the Orthodox Church, I have been asked recently for my opinion about the events currently happening in Ukraine. I am quite willing to give my opinion when asked, since that is my job as a teacher and a presbyter. But I will not do so here, […]

Our secular society seems to believe that if an afterlife exists, it is a uniformly pleasant one, and that with the possible exception of mass murderers, Nazis, child-molesters and a few others who commit monstrous deeds, everyone goes to heaven after they die. The technical and theological term for this […]

Just as it is difficult to gain a true perspective of the size of a mountain when one is actually on the mountain, so it is difficult to understand how revolutionary a change is when in the midst of the revolution. And we are today in the midst of a […]

All the more reason today to know our Master’s manger, and to recognize that all that we have comes from Him. Oxen and donkeys know who their true benefactors are, and we should be at least as smart as they are. Let us give thanks to God, and know that all that we have and ever will have comes from Him.

In fact the church is not an institution, however many outward similarities to an institution it may possess. The term ‘ekklesia’ meant a gathering, an assembly. People assembled or gathered—that is, they left their homes to congregate in a particular place for a particular reason.