This past week I attended the Ancient Faith Writing and Podcasting Conference (AFCon), an event which I also attended last year (its inaugural year), where I spoke on ministry in social media. This year, though, I wasn’t one of the scheduled speakers but was just attending along with everyone else. Last year, I have to admit that I was a bit ambivalent about attending.âŠ
Tithing is good for the Orthodox Christian and therefore good for the Orthodox parish. So why don’t more Orthodox Christians tithe? We know the usual reasons: We’re not used to it. Back in the old country the government paid for the church. The parish was founded on the “dues” model. Tithing is “Protestant.” Orthodox people are stingy. We just don’t have it in ourâŠ
The following is from a larger talk I am working on about Orthodoxy in the West. Secularism is essentially the idea that one can conceive of a world without God. It is the belief in an autonomous order existing apart from the divine order. It is not necessarily a denial of Godâs existence, by the way. Such outright atheism has never been that attractiveâŠ
That nationalism exists among Orthodox Christians, both in their historic lands and also here in America, is now so self-evident that youâd have to be living under a rock to miss it. But what does that mean for us who seek to preach the Gospel?
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost / First Sunday of Luke, September 27, 2015 II Corinthians 6:16-7:1; Luke 5:1-11 Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. I had a friend who was a Ph.D. student at a university in New York City. He was a brilliant, traditional Orthodox Christian whoâŠ
In her review of Kyriakos Markides’s Gifts of the Desert, Frederica Mathewes-Green says she had a hard time finding Jesus in the book: Markidesâ previous book, âThe Mountain of Silenceâ (2001), was read eagerly by those interested in Orthodox spirituality, chiefly because he had faithfully transcribed taped conversations with a monk trained on Mt. Athos, Father Maximos. Though Markides himself seemed not wholly onâŠ
Several times now I have been asked by folks who were not at Fr. Matthew Baker’s funeral this past Saturday to write something about it. I have to admit that I do not really want to. I am a bit exhausted. But I will at least mention that it was beautiful—not merely in an aesthetic sense, though of course it was, with the roughlyâŠ
I awoke this morning hoping that it wasn’t true, that somehow, the nightmare of losing my friend of ten years so instantly had just been a dream. But it wasn’t. Fr. Matthew Baker is dead. And I realized that I have to write something about him, to capture for just a moment something of what he meant to me. Promising. Brilliant. Down-to-earth. Genius. Important.âŠ