Having an ethnic heritage that was not actually passed down to me as an inheritance seems like another exercise in that odd, defamiliarized life that Third Culture Kids can never quite escape. And whatâs more, being an Orthodox Christian has in many ways felt like an exercise in the same narrative. A people who were not my own have become my people.
What I do affects who I am and what I believe, especially when it is something I do over and over. It is my habits, my repeated actions, that influence how I see the world and who I am.
At the end of time, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride forth, bringing famine, pestilence, war and death upon mankind, God will send forth His holy ones to match them and to overcome them.
Things will settle out in this crisis and competing authorities will finally converge on a consensus. But our problem with the hostile wilderness will remain.
The argument against iconography breaks down because those who reject icons do not understand what idolatrous images were actually used for. They were not merely religious art. They are a kind of religious technology designed to trap and control a god.
When the gospel began to be preached, forgiveness from God was a revelation, something new that was outside of anyoneâs expectation of how a god should operate.
Sexual immorality is a kind of evil that introduces corruption into a person and his community in a way that is deep and damaging like almost nothing else is.