What the hell is a Judeo-Christian?

Image via Wikipedia

I don’t know if my dog likes watching news commentary and reporting but, when I come home, that’s what’s on TV sometimes, so he must. From that, I pick up snatches of what your “average joe” is thinking about today.  Today it’s discussion about governments posting religious monuments and stem cell research. It’s [...]

Read Full Post »

Our Christian Names

Image via Wikipedia

In our quasi-revolutionary, neo-gnostic culture, including most especially academia, and especially still religious academia and its amateur counterpart among those of us who read books, it is popular to refer to every scholar (and eventually everyone who has said anything at all) by surname. “Ecco’s thesis is…” “Jaki is daring when…” “Cantor actually [...]

Read Full Post »

Comments

Image by Diego Cupolo via Flickr

I get a lot of comments I don’t post. I think it’s only fair to say why I post some and not others.
* I don’t post comments that offer an agenda that I find despicable, tedious, or needlessly controversial, especially when it’s not relevant to the content. Things that come [...]

Read Full Post »

A friend shared with me “Super Correctness” (Chapter 63 from Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works). Happily, this piece is also available [online]. Now if I could just find chapter 61 “The Desert in the Backyard”.

Read Full Post »

Orthodox Fast at Thanksgiving

At Thanksgiving, we’re always greeted with rationalizations, prevarication, and even abuses of Scripture to justify breaking the Fast, and right in the middle of the Fast, too, which makes about as much sense as having a dance contest in the middle of a funeral.
Last year, I spoke to this – it’s just not an Orthodox [...]

Read Full Post »

On Friends Parting Ways

I’ve noticed that most of the people around me don’t have friendships that end. In fact, they seem to think it strange that someone might. Sometimes they say, “that doesn’t happen to me.” But I listen to them, and I observe that in fact relationships do sort of stop happening for them – they just [...]

Read Full Post »

Why meat, wine, and oil?

This weekend I was asked why we fast from meat, fish, eggs, dairy, alcohol, and oil. The person wanted a neat explanation. There isn’t one.
My own understanding will differ from some and we Orthodox are OK with that. We’re not OK with not keeping the rule, but we’re OK with different understandings of why the [...]

Read Full Post »

Praying with Hypoglycemia

First, I don’t make excuses. I’m Orthodox. I believe that my own sin is responsible for the death at work in my body, and therefore for any illness I have and its results. I am responsible. It is my fault. That is the Orthodox mind. I brought death into this world. I am Adam. I [...]

Read Full Post »

The Faith of Saintly Augustine

I read a recent comment on a blog discussion about St. Augustine. We all know that St. Augustine published things that, in hindsight, have proved unfortunate in how they have been received and used by the heterodox. That, of course, says nothing about how they have been understood by the Orthodox, or were, at least [...]

Read Full Post »

Sightings

A church sign at a mega-church on the way to work reads “The World is Yours”. Instantly I remembered where I’d heard that before. On the mount, when Christ was being tempted. “I will give you the cities of the world…” What was the response again? “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.” [...]

Read Full Post »

Why Wait? You can Have Your Beastie Now.

I find this interesting, when we throw off the rules of thinking we’ve been taught by evangelicalism in the culture, and we don’t try to titillate ourselves with numerological and symbolic esoterica, which is a form of demonism and conjuring demons, and we just think about what’s being said, there’s a lot there.
I’m not claiming [...]

Read Full Post »

Who’s YOUR Bishop?

Fear-based relationships are the hallmark of corporate life. “So and so is flying in. Clean up your area, dress extra nice, be on your toes, be careful.”
Walk the corridors of a corporate complex, be self-assured, chin up, eye contact, confidently winsome, brisk and purposeful but calm and relaxed, and impeccably but effortlessly arranged, and men [...]

Read Full Post »

Feeling Randy

Ayn Rand’s re-translation of Aristotle’s logic, ethics, and aesthetics into modern parlance is invaluable. However, she seems to have followed some trails and assumed they are the only possible ones. Atheism is one of those. Scores of Randies think that atheism is the only rational alternative simply because it fits with what they’ve learned from [...]

Read Full Post »

Why I Love my Wife

One of the reasons, if not the reason, I am continually falling in love with my wife, over and over again, is that my wife shows me the face of the poor.
My wife was born very premature and very small, and only just survived with a lot of care, but she has had a lifelong [...]

Read Full Post »