“Life in Christ”

On January 6, Christians of Western tradition (Roman Catholics and Protestants) commemorate the Epiphany or manifestation of the newborn Christ to the Magi. To Orthodox Christians, this day celebrates the Theophany or...

A woman in the parish recently buried her husband after his long and losing battle with cancer. A thirteen-year old girl still cries herself to sleep each night several months after her parents’ bitter divorce. A man off the...

Christian life and faith are filled with all kinds of paradoxes. The Church Fathers called these “antinomies,” meaning thoughts and ideas that seem contradictory but aren’t. They simply refuse to fit into the usual...

The hand of God moves through Israel’s history, to create and shape persons, events, institutions and rituals into prophetic foreshadowings or prefigurations of the coming salvation. Through a careful, contemplative reading...

In the preceding column I raised questions about the terribly difficult issue of euthanasia, and specifically, whether in an Orthodox Christian perspective there could ever be a morally acceptable way to hasten the death of...

“Your mother has a very strong constitution.”

The nurse is right. She does have a strong constitution. Four days ago they stopped giving her food and liquids. (Along with a DNR she had insisted, “No tubes, no forced...

In this and the following two columns, I would like to share some thoughts on what is perhaps the most poignant and difficult experience in human relationships: the dying of someone we deeply love. These are not explorations...

In our Orthodox tradition we are usually very careful to distinguish between the “Dormition” of the Mother of God and her “Assumption” into heaven. The former, we feel, is properly Orthodox, while the latter strikes us as a...

Some years ago a close family friend passed away in a nursing home. She spent the last months of her life in what appeared to be a state of semi-consciousness, rocking back and forth in her chair and muttering to herself,...

The news media have been having their heyday with the so-called “Prosperity Gospel.” It gives them a chance to mock religion, particularly Christianity, and to attack it at the same time.

It’s not that the “Gospel of...