“Life in Christ”

Most students of the Bible today would consider “allegory” to be less than useful. In fact they would judge it to be a fanciful, even dangerous way to interpret passages of Scripture. By “allegory,” they understand basically what the editors of the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary understood: “the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and…

The Ecumenical Movement seems blocked in an impasse. From the movement’s beginnings early in the last century, Protestant and Orthodox Christians have made up the membership of the World Council of Churches, and to the present day bilateral dialogues have continued between various Protestant denominations and the canonical Orthodox churches. In…

The frescoed head is all that remains of an anonymous “Ascetic,” whose image was reproduced on a card a Catholic friend once gave me, to help guide me on my way toward Orthodoxy.

The reproduction includes a portion of the wall on which, I suppose, this saintly man’s entire body once appeared. It’s easy to imagine that wall as part of an ancient…

For some time now I have been appealing to various people to reopen the question of “the beginning of human life,” in order to base an Orthodox view of the status of the embryo on biological fact, that is, on the truth about how God creates human beings. However embryologists finally assess the issue, there is a moral line that should never be…

For many years Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch has been engaged in ecumenical dialogue, especially with the Roman Catholic Church and Islam. This past September, in a message delivered before a Roman Catholic and Orthodox audience and reported in the Service Orthodoxe de Presse (#282, Nov. 2003, 22-24), the Patriarch issued a call for “prophetic…

In this season of Christ’s Nativity, the title of Vigen Guroian’s fine collection of essays on ethical issues [Incarnate Love, University of Notre Dame Press, first ed. 1988] comes back to me with special poignancy. For the past several years I’ve spent a couple of weeks each spring in Romania, visiting theological faculties, monasteries and parish…

“God reveals Himself in the silence of the heart.” The early desert monks, followed by ascetic laborers of every generation, came to know this truth through their own, most personal experience.

We can acquire knowledge about God in many different ways, first of all through the Bible and the Liturgy. The question, however, is how we move from…

When we talk our usual Orthodox church language, a lot of people haven’t the vaguest idea what we’re talking about. This was brought home to me in a rather harsh way not long ago, when a lapsed Catholic monk visited our parish. He had heard reports of the beauty of Orthodox worship and the depths of Orthodox spiritual life, and he came to experience…

There is a persistent notion among ourselves as well as among others that we Orthodox don’t read the Bible, at least not outside of liturgical services. However accurate this may have been in past generations, it is gratifying to note that it is less and less the case today. Increasingly our parishes—perhaps especially but certainly not…

The little box of CDs wedged between the front seats of our car contains labels such as Mozart’s Piano Concertos 18 & 19, The Vigil service of the Kiev Monastery, Tomaso Albinoni’s Cantatas from Opus 4, and “The Best of the Beach Boys.” (“That’s Daddy,” my kids sigh, rolling their eyes toward heaven.)

When I’m tired or on a long trip, though, I…

Orthodox Christians begin and end the liturgical year with celebrations dedicated to the Virgin Mary, whom we venerate as the Theotokos or “bearer of God.” On September 8, the end of the first week of the new year, we commemorate her Nativity or birth; on August 15, we close the year with the feast of her Dormition, her “falling asleep” and…

A devastating cartoon appeared recently in our local paper. The caption reads: “The New Sacrament.” It depicts a somber and stately Episcopal church, with stained glass windows and cathedral ceiling. The view is from the back of the altar area, looking out toward the nave. Several small, robed figures surround a cleric, who is garbed all in white.…

Two recent cases illustrate the difficulty—and often the agony—experienced by family members and medical teams when they have to decide whether or not to remove life-support from an apparently dying patient.

This past July a twenty-six year old man was reportedly placed on life-support following an automobile accident. He was in a coma for two…

Some questions never go away, even those we think we’ve answered once and for all. One of those questions concerns the beginning of human life: when we as human beings actually come into existence. This is a biological issue, intimately linked to, yet independent of, the philosophical or theological matter of when the child in utero can be judged to…

Life in Christ is made up of countless small yet touchingly beautiful miracles.

Throughout the afternoon I had been reading some recent reflections by a variety of bioethicists on the possibilities and apprehensions surrounding human cloning: in particular, fabricating children in our own image and likeness by a-sexual replication through the…

The phone rang right at suppertime. An hysterical voice on the other end started berating me for not listening to her, for abandoning her in her most dire need, for not really hearing her confession, for being self-centered and abusive towards her and everyone else in the parish. No, rather it was the parish community itself, those egotistical,…

There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the richness of Orthodox tradition regarding “prayer of the heart” and the poor prayer that is part of our personal experience. Prayer of the heart requires “hesychia,” a deep inner stillness that permits us to hear “the still small voice of God.” Is that really within our reach today, given the…

A young Orthodox priest had just arrived in the hospital waiting room to minister to a grieving family. He talked for a while with the oldest member, a man in his late sixties who was struggling to come to terms with his wife’s rapid decline.

The priest—call him ‘Father Paul’—spent a few minutes with the husband, then went into the ICU where…

With the U.S. Senate voting overwhelmingly to ban the late-term procedure known as “partial birth abortion,” we are led, as Christians in a highly secular and pluralistic society, to look once again at the implications of what the French euphemistically call the “voluntary interruption of a pregnancy.”

Over the centuries, theologians have held…

Orthodox Christianity calls us to live on two different but intimately related levels. One is the level of daily experience: life in family and on the job, paying bills and doing the shopping, cutting the grass and getting the kids to their various activities. It is also life marked by anxiety in a world of war and political upheaval, of poverty and…