“Life in Christ”

It is around eleven p.m. on the Saturday night of Holy Pascha: “Easter” in Orthodox tradition. The faithful gather quietly in the darkened church, while a reader chants passages from the Book of Acts. Shortly before midnight the priest pronounces the blessing to begin the brief office of Nocturnes. At the prescribed moment, he exits the altar for…

A certain mentality current in the middle of the last century lingers on in many quarters today. It is the notion that Christianity, as we know and celebrate it in the Church, is attributable not to Jesus, but to the Apostle Paul.

In the mid-twentieth century, German Lutheran theology popularized a radical distinction between “the Jesus of history”…

The anaphora, or Eucharistic prayer, of the Liturgy of Saint Basil contains a petition that has always struck me. As the choir sings the Hymn to the Theotokos, “All of creation rejoices in you,” the priest offers a long series of intercessions for the saints, the living and departed, and those who bring gifts and offerings for the service of…

The Roman Catholic Church recently announced that it is closing the doors on “limbo.” For important theological reasons, this is a good thing. Yet it gives us cause to reflect a little on our own understanding of the state of existence after death and on the development of theology within the Church.

Developed by medieval Latin theologians, limbo…

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, a pillar of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe, recently passed away at the tender age of 98. I last saw her in October, following the Divine Liturgy we celebrated in “The Crypt,” the parish of the Holy Trinity, located in the Russian Orthodox cathedral on the rue Daru, in Paris. Elisabeth came up to venerate the cross I…

If “hell is other people,” as Sartre concluded, then maybe heaven is too.

Every once in a while we meet someone who leaves an indelible and transforming mark on us. They can be longtime friends, casual acquaintances, or people who cross our path one time only. They can leave us with good or bad memories, yet the effect they have on us is profound,…

With the so-called “natural disasters” we have faced this past year, from the tsunami in Southeast Asia to recent tornados in the American Midwest—in addition to Katrina, Rita and the devastating earthquake in Pakistan—it is only reasonable to ask whether we are alone in our suffering and anguish, or if God Himself participates in it.

During…

Thanksgiving is upon us in a few days and already we’re in the midst of the “Christmas Season.” Every year the festivities of rampant commercialism and cheap parodies of Nativity begin a little earlier. Soon we’ll be hanging out stockings as we await the Parousia of the Easter Bunny.

This brings me back to the only real wellspring of sanity in this…

At rare and privileged moments we find ourselves overcome by a burning desire for God. Something from beyond presses us to venture into a mystery that both reveals and conceals God’s very being. That Something or Someone leads us on a sacred quest that attains its end not by reason, but by way of the heart. Consequently, the language we use to…

Anyone who reads the New Testament carefully notices the striking differences between the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and the Gospel of John. If the first three are termed “synoptic,” it is because there are close similarities between them that suggest that they represent a stream of tradition very different from the one that lies…

Musicians, poets or graphic artists will often claim to be “inspired” to produce a particular composition or design. Like the ancient Hebrew prophets, they feel themselves “seized,” “filled” or “carried away” by some invading power. A force from beyond themselves takes control of their mental faculties and guides or compels them toward an expression…

A small group of a dozen or so young medical professionals were sitting around a table, munching cookies and downing soft drinks. They were all mainline Protestants or Evangelicals. Some were very much connected to their church tradition; others were thirsting for something else, which clearly meant something more. They had asked us to come and talk…

The Orthodox liturgical calendar is filled with the names of obscure people we know little or nothing about. Some of those names are composites. They are stereotypes based on real persons, usually confessors or martyrs, whose personal history is lost to us, but who come down to us in the Church’s collective memory as courageous witnesses to the…

The usual answer given to the title of this article is that the Church Fathers provide us with invaluable spiritual guidance, based on their own faith and experience. They interpret Scripture and other elements of Holy Tradition in such a way as to educate us in the Way that leads to the Kingdom of God. And by the witness of their own life, which…

An unacknowledged but powerful presumption guides a great deal of today’s theology, whether it appears in the popular press, in scholarly journals or in Sunday morning homilies. It is the conviction that language and images that depict transcendent rather than empirical reality are mere metaphors. They are “symbols” in the modern, popular sense,…

In 1999, the Romanian National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism published a volume entitled “The Imprisoned Church: Romania, 1944-1989.” It is presented as a “dictionary” that details the persecution and suffering endured by clergy and other figures in the Orthodox, Catholic (Eastern and Roman) and Protestant Churches in Romania during the…

One of my worst passions is irritation and one of my worst irritations is church billboard slogans. I don’t know why these things bother me so much, but they do.

Between the Piggly Wiggly grocery store on the Maybank Highway, some ten miles north of here, and the Rockville, S.C., “yacht club” the same distance south, there are about twenty-five…

The film “Million Dollar Baby” caused quite a stir in certain pro-life circles. Although director and actor Clint Eastwood dealt with the tragic end of his heroine’s life with sensitivity and compassion, many people were shocked at his apparent endorsement of euthanasia. The controversy was unnecessary because the entire problematic surrounding…

In his reflections on the Knowledge of God, Saint Silouan of Mount Athos (+ 1938) speaks in a very simple and beautiful way of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the faithful. They are words that seem especially significant in this time of Pentecost, when we celebrate and relive the coming of the Spirit in power, to renew us…

Psalm 67/68 is considered by most biblical scholars to be the most difficult of all psalms to interpret.^[1] The current consensus holds that the psalm was an ancient cultic hymn, originally recited in an autumn festival by the covenant-community of Israel. Its theme celebrates the coming of God to His people, from Sinai to Zion, in order to…