Ecclesiastical Nostalgia
If one is the type that is easily discouraged, one can find today much that is discouraging—secularism is making inroads, even in the Orthodox Church, men of power scorn and minimize the insights proffered by Christians,...
“No Other Foundation”
by Fr. Lawrence Farley
What’s Wrong with Gay Marriage?
The best place to access the views, questions, prejudices and challenges of the World is, I believe, the office water-cooler. The next best places would be the Huffington Post and (for Canadians), the CBC. The water-cooler...
Learning in War-Time
Fellow fans of C.S. Lewis (aka “our father among the saints”) will perhaps recognize the title of this piece as taken from an essay of Lewis’ own. This was the title of a sermon he preached at the Church of St. Mary the...
Three Browncoat Meditations
Under my black cassock, I am wearing a brown coat. Not literally, of course, but certainly metaphorically. That is, I am an unapologetic fan, defender, and devotee of the TV series Firefly. My family owns three (that’s...
Trusting the Eye-witnesses: A Reply to Sullivan’s Christianity in Crisis
The April 2 edition of Newsweek Magazine featured a piece (just in time for Western Easter) by journalist Andrew Sullivan. It is a heartfelt piece, urging its readers to ignore (i.e. reject) all forms of contemporary...
The First of His Miracles
In the Gospel of John, we read that Christ attended a wedding in Cana of Galilee along with His disciples, and that His Mother was there too. When the wine gave out, she asked Him to do a public miracle, openly manifesting...
No Other Foundation
Christian teachers come in all theological shapes and sizes, as the Corinthians of St. Paul’s day discovered. Some spoke with unadorned plainness, like Paul himself, who was determined to forego the fancy rhetoric...
The Annunciation and the Secularism of Christianity
We are so used to hearing the story of the Annunciation that we sometimes miss things in it. One of the things we miss is how secular is the setting for it. It is an understandable mistake—for us, the whole theme is...
Western Reflections on the Death of an Eastern Pope
On Saturday March 17, Pope Shenouda, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, died at the age of 88. The Coptic Church in Egypt numbers an estimated ten million Christians, and the Pope (the title was used to...
Why Marriage?
As the element of Christianity in popular culture continues to erode, one of the many things which separates that popular and secular culture from the culture of the Church is the understanding of marriage. In North...