Reflections in Christ

The Ladder of Saint John leads the Christian, step by step, rung by rung, along the ascent to heaven. Naturally, the higher steps…

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Today, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, the holy apostle Paul instructs us that “he who sanctifies”—Christ himself…

The angel’s greeting—“Hail!”—literally means “rejoice” in Greek, and this coincidence was not lost on the Fathers of the Church, who saw the angelic announcement as…

The earliest Church, from the days of the apostles and into the first centuries, had an abundant share of guts and what everyone else regarded as perversity.  Its claims…

The Cross stands at the center of the fast as it stands at the center of all our activities, indeed, at the center of our entire life. The world is cruciform, and, as…

One week after the Sunday of Orthodoxy, we attach an appendix, as it were, to that celebration: the feast Saint Gregory Palamas. Saint Gregory Palamas’s teachings…

What is the triumph of Orthodoxy? Historically, this was the victory of the Iconodule party in the Byzantine Empire, with imperial backing. Yet, since…

In his hymns for today’s feast, Saint John of Euchaita refers to this day as “heralding from afar the coming feast of the Resurrection,” stating that “this present time…

I cannot be the only one who has had the experience of visiting a non-Orthodox church service and finding it stunningly empty and plain.  After long…

After a month of preparation, we begin the forty days of Great Lent. During these days of ascetic struggle, may we all take refuge in the prayers…