“Presented for your consideration,” as Rod Serling would say: photo of what some would say was a beautiful woman.
The woman in question is Lady Diana Mitford, and Mr. James Lees-Milne, who was a friend of the family, said of her, “She was the nearest thing to Botticelli’s Venus that I have ever seen.” Looking at her, I am reminded of the…
From my happy home north of the forty-ninth parallel, I look southwards with appreciation for the American vision of freedom. The American national anthem says it well: its star-spangled flag waves over the land of the free and the home of the brave. Anyone that has laboured under political tyranny, whether in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or other…
I offer the observation in the title defiantly, because there is much evidence to the contrary. Admittedly, I am a happy camper—more or less healthy, my extended family happy and doing well, blessed with a wonderful parish and a good bishop. Even my cat is contented. But I am aware that many people in the world are not happy campers, that…
From the days of St. Paul, the Church has been compared to an army. Paul regularly used military language to describe the Christian life, talking about “taking every thought captive” using “the weapons of our warfare” (2 Cor. 10:3-5), and about “putting on the armour of God” in their “fight against principalities and powers, the…
Our present secular culture has fixed a great gap between people of my generation (i.e. those from the Jurassic period) and modern young people. And this gap is most easily observed when looking at our divergent understandings of fornication. Indeed, I remember once giving instruction to a young (chaste) catechumen, and casually mentioning that the…
In my years as a priest and of sharing the Gospel, I have heard many reasons offered for not becoming a Christian: scandals associated with clergy, the wealth of the Church, the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc. etc. I thought I had more or less heard it all, and so was unprepared for a reason one young man offered to justify his rejection of…
In contemporary Orthodoxy, we are accustomed to referring to Christ as one of the Holy Trinity. He is usually referred to as “Christ our true God”, and the Gospel of John, which stresses His divine status, is, I would suggest, our favourite of the four Gospels. When announcing the reading from (say) Matthew’s Gospel, the deacon says, “Bless…
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, the Church makes up a small fraction of society, and our bishops are sometimes not up to meeting the multitude of challenges…
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 however retains its pride of place as the site more often visited by the common man who, if he retains his common sense, tends…
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 Virgin in Oxford in October 1939. His country was trembling in fear as they entered another unwanted war, and students in…
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 “three”) DVD copies of the series—one for watching, one for loaning, and one for an emergency backup in case something…
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 Christianity and to embrace Jesus instead. Reading this thoughtful essay, I could not shake the feeling that Mr. Sullivan was…
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 to all that He was the Messiah. He refused, calling her rather formally “Madam” rather than the usual “Mother” (the…
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 fashionable in his day, and to know nothing other than Jesus Christ, and Him crucified (see 1 Cor. 2:2). Some spoke with great…
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 religious. Any story about the Theotokos is religious, any story containing an angel is religious. When we read of Mary…
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 describe the bishop of Alexandria before it was used to describe the bishop of Rome) ruled as its chief pastor for forty years. I…
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 America, about one half of all marriages end in divorce. Many people live together first, marrying only later, and some choose to…
Those familiar with Lenten liturgy will recognize the title as part of the Lenten “Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian”, which reads in part, “O Lord and Master of my life…grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for You are blessed unto ages of ages.” This prayer is not the only part of our tradition which forbids…
During my pre-Orthodox days when I was an Anglican priest, one of the most popular services for the devout was the so-called “8 am service”—a much-shortened Communion service offered without hymns, without sermon—and usually without many people. Those who favored it said they liked the service because it was short and quiet and one could…
Fans of the TV series “Firefly” will recognize the title as a quote from a line in one of that series’ episodes. Two of the protagonists were about to be killed by a howling mob when their friends suddenly showed up to rescue them. “Looks like we arrived just in the nick of time”, says one of them. “What does that make us?” The reply:…