Glory to God for All Things
Glory to God for All Things
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Glory to God for All Things
What Matters?
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God matters and what matters to God matters. I know that sounds very redundant, but I’m not sure how else I want to say it. There are many things that do not matter – because they do not matter to God. Knowing the difference between the two – what matters to God and what does not requires that we know God. And this is theology – to know God. If I have…
Glory to God for All Things
Seeds from Different Worlds
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God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew, and everything came up that could come up, but all growing things live and are alive only through the feeling of their contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, what has grown up in you will die. Then you will become indifferent to life and even grow to…
This Side of Glory
NDG/JJ R: Wrap-up
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This Side of Glory
NDG/JJ R: Day Two
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This Side of Glory
NDG/JJ R: Day One
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This Side of Glory
The No-Dang-Good Jesse James Revue
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This Side of Glory
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Forget yourself and you will know yourself. — Saints Barsunuphius and John
This Side of Glory
Advertising and the state of Art -- epilogue: pomo
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Finishing up this big foursome, I felt like I had to at least try to define postmodernism and how the fall of the old regime is affecting what culture producers are doing now. For reasons I’ll go into below, the parameters of pomo are a little indistinct, but hopefully this’ll give an idea about it. And if you feel like skimming, you can skip down to the bottom for my two-cents on…
This Side of Glory
Advertising and the state of Art -- epilogue: Art
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This Side of Glory
Advertising and the state of Art -- part I
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(This started out life as a book review, but as I started adding in thoughts about the subject, I realized that it was more of a brain-dump of my accrued thoughts from years of having tried to figure out what the heck happened to the once-honorable visual arts — painting, drawing, sculpture. It got lengthy, so I broke it into two pieces, but I’d like to think that in the end it…
Praying in the Rain
Guatemala
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Glory be to God,I have just returned from a life changing trip to an orphanage in Guatemala city, Guatemala.This orphanage is run by four God-fearing Orthodox nuns. The founding nuns used to be Catholic monastics, but they became dissatisfied with thier church, and durring a tour of the Holy Land, discovered Orthodoxy, and converted, much to the Catholic church’s dismay.When they decided to start a convent in Guatemala, little did they know…
This Side of Glory
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God listens, not to our voice, but to our heart. — Cyprian of Carthage
This Side of Glory
Wildlife to Grace -- buzz off!
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Spring has been cool this year. Not ‘cool’ as in ‘neato’ … just colder than we want. But the sunlight was dappling through this afternoon, and so I decided to go outside when I let Clementine into the back yard for her 2:00 Check Stuff Out duty. Clementine has been getting more barky as she sheds a little of her puppyish dopey-ness and begins the business of being a dog, so she…
This Side of Glory
Dreams give wings to fools
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The senseless have vain and false hopes, and dreams give wings to fools. — Sirach 34:1 Hopefully I don’t sound like I’m being harsh to quote this passage from the apocryphal book of Sirach. I’m a bit of a dreamer myself (and I have the C grade average to prove it), so I have nothing but good things to say about the innocent capacity of people to imagine fabulousness and pass the…
Praying in the Rain
It's Only Reasonable
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I was invited last week to listen to a professor of theology—quite famous for his Evangelical orthodoxy and at the same time his ecumenical openness. I was impressed. I was impressed by his tight case, his grasp of his opponents’ logical mistakes and unexamined assumptions. Overall, it was a marvelous ride for an overly educated Orthodox priest who mostly agrees and similarly wishes to resist the forces of religious indifferation. And as…
Praying in the Rain
CHRISTIAN FAITH AND SAME-SEX ATTRACTION – A New Book from Fr. Thomas Hopko
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Eastern Orthodox Reflections. Father Thomas Hopko draws on the wisdom of the Orthodox Christian Church and the Holy Scriptures to help us understand same-sex attraction, with both compassion and clarity. Combining theological and pastoral insights, this small gem will aid pastors, those who experience same-sex desires, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the nature of our identity and our sexuality. This book is in reality a primer on how to overcome…
Praying in the Rain
Children in Church
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Dear Brothers and Sisters, As God has seen fit to grant our mission growth, we are now experiencing growing pains. Particularly, we are learning how to incorporate families with young children into our parish life. I think over the last little while both parents and the community at large has felt some discomfort as parents have struggled to learn how to teach their children to behave in Church. With this in mind,…
Praying in the Rain
Pascha Party!
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Praying in the Rain
Christ is Risen!
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This Side of Glory
Bright Week do's & don'ts
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How long have I been doing this, and yet I still didn’t remember (or didn’t know) all the stuff in Orthodixie‘s list of Bright Week practices? Specifically: During Bright Week, our prayers in church and at home are sung and not read as we sing all week the feast of the risen Christ: Christ is risen! During Bright Week, we do not read from the psalter at home or in church for…
This Side of Glory
Um ...
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This Side of Glory
Chicken Little says: The flu is coming! The flu is coming! (cough, cough)
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I go back and forth on whether or not to be seriously scared of the avian flu. It has gotten more press for the last couple years than DDT poisoning, alar in apples, killer bees, mega-earthquakes, overpopulation, impending meteor impacts and any of the other predicted catastrophes we were supposed to live in fear of, all rolled into a ball. But since all of those other disasters kind of fizzled out (at…
This Side of Glory
No foolin'
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Feel like I need to mention that this is my patron saint’s day. I think there’s something comical in Mary of Egypt’s saint’s day being on April Fool’s day, given that (a) she’s my patron saint, so it’s fitting, and (b) it seems like a joke to people, who are bound to think of her always on the fifth Sunday of Lent. Okay, maybe I’m reaching here. But you don’t find humor…
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Forgive me
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On Forgiveness Sunday last year, several Ortho-bloggers asked forgiveness, and several (here ,here and here) are doing it again this year. Last year, it seemed like an odd thing to do, but it doesn’t this year. Is that maturity, or have I just been blogging long enough to realize how easy it is to offend? Probably the latter. So for times when I’ve offended, or been petty or rude or unkind, or…
This Side of Glory
Political incorrectness at the turn of the last century
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My sister sent me this link to an archived cartoon that ran 1907-1928, and I thought it was a peach. It’s an unconscionably grouchy cartoon called “The Outbursts of Everett True,” and the set-up is so simple that modern cartoonists and cartoon-lovers are bound to feel jealous of what you could get away with in a simpler day. The formula — virtually unchanging for its 21-year run — went like this: Panel…
This Side of Glory
Frederica's weather report
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Via Christianity Today: The influence of the culture on all those individuals, including Christians, is less like that of a formal institution and more like the weather. We can observe that, under current conditions, it’s cloudy with a chance of cynicism. Crudity is up, nudity is holding steady, and there is a 60 percent chance that any recent movie will include a shot of a man urinating. Large fluffy clouds of sentimental…
