Just a few quick thoughts for today from Edwin Friedman, whose works I’ve been getting to know over the past few years—all three from his work A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix: Even the United States Government Printing Office has pamphlets about “A Teenager in Your House” which, like “Termites in Your Basement,” is designed to teach parents…
Since most Americans are relaxing at home today, I thought I would shift gears a bit and share a little humor with you. For several years now, I’ve been collecting quotes from the works of William Shakespeare that amuse me to misconstrue as being applicable to Thanksgiving. Here’s the full collection: Shakespeare’s militant vegetarian complaining about the other guests eating turkey for Thanksgiving: “Why…
One of the things I’ve encountered among some Orthodox Christians in America is the idea that, since most Christians in history were basically illiterate—that’s one reason we have iconography, right?—then there really is not an urgency to teach people what we might think of as the “data” of the Orthodox faith. It’s enough to have a good piety, to be a good person, to…
My post today for my 40 days of blogging is over at the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy blog. Here’s an excerpt: One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years is the growth of all kinds of “Post-_______” Christianity. By this I mean varieties of Christianity that are all generally within the Evangelical Protestant genre yet explicitly do not embrace any particular tradition. Typically, what…
The feast we celebrate today in the Orthodox Church is the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, a feast based on attestation found in the ancient Protoevangelion of James. Many of my sermons on this feast have dwelt on dealing with the historicity of the feast, something I myself have struggled with. It is not difficult to believe that the Virgin Mary entered…
Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost / Ninth Sunday of Luke, November 20, 2016 Galatians 6:11-18; Luke 12:16-21 Very Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Today we are wrapping up our five-week sermon series asking this question: What is our mission? The Gospel reading we hear today for the…
Included in the lectionary I read today is this short verse: For we walk by faith, not by sight. (II Corinthians 5:7) The context here is St. Paul’s larger discussion in II Corinthians 5 of our hope of the resurrection, but this verse often gets taken out of this context to be given as a general rule for spiritual life. Taking things out of…
For today’s entry, I wanted to share some excerpts from some of my reading lately. We’ve been doing a conversation-oriented class on acquiring the spirit of peace at St. Paul’s over the past several weeks, and this past Wednesday night included the discussion of letting go of the need to control others as engendering peace within our own souls. And one of the things…
