While our daily devotional is on hiatus while we do some improvements to our web presence, please share this news about our upcoming Faith Encouraged LIVE program for this Sunday. Fr. Barnabas’ special guest will be Fr. Panayiotis Papageorgiou of Holy Transfiguration parish in Marietta, GA and they will discuss the wisdom behind the Orthodox spiritual discipline of venerating the saints. That’s this Sunday at 8 PM Eastern on AncientFaith.com.
Truth has a way of upsetting things, especially those ways in us that are threatened by truth. And yet, we are promised that truth will set us free! On the surface, that sounds wonderful, but reality is quite different. My first “career” was in law enforcement. One memory I will never quite get over is my first, real, confrontation with a man who had become “institutionalized” by his repeated periods of incarceration.…
He simply stared at me wondering how to respond. We were marching in a parade of Christian believers supporting the presence of our faith in the public square. He was a very dynamic and animated member of one of the local mega-churches that was a charismatic church with thousands in attendance every Sunday. I was a new convert to Orthodoxy. He was carrying a banner with the words “Praise Jesus” on it.…
“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” Alfred A. Montapert And, that, my dearest, is the reality that maturity presents us all. This reminds me of King David and his complaint in Psalm 72 (73) about the wicked and their seemingly happy lives without any negative consequences of their evil actions. David was furious that he, practicing righteousness, was being hunted and persecuted, while evil men prospered.…
“Salt makes people thirsty. People are thirsting for more of His word. Sisters and brothers pour salt on each other. You are the salt, the salt of the earth.” These lyrics from an old song from my Christian youth group days really tells the story of a central purpose of the faith in our everyday lives. We really are to be “salt” and “light” to our world. Since the most ancient of…
Today we hear of the righteous who pleased God from Adam to the precious Theotokos and righteous Joseph. Our God could have saved us without any of us, but His eternal love extends His mighty hand to each of us with the invitation to come and join Him in the salvation of all creation. And in this invitation our God reveals the path to our own salvation: the redemption and strengthening of…
Of Course We Are Called to be Moral – A Response to My Critics Fr. Stephen Freeman Well, the firestorm has moved even to my host, Ancient Faith Blogs. There, you can find aresponse and a critique of my last article, The Unmoral Christian. I find nothing in the response with which I disagree. The author argues that externals are often important, certainly for beginners, and suggests that I have overplayed my…
There is a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet that I have always loved. It comes in Act 1, scene 5: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It’s such a wonderful encounter in the play, and it serves as such a wonderful illustration of the necessary humility that we all must embrace when it comes to our own intellect and our so-called “rational” mind.…
Yeah, THAT old saying! A quote from Virgil’s Aeneid says “the descent to hell is easy.” And no one ever expects their good intentions to turn out bad. That’s the “law of unintended consequences.” It seems we humans are better at coming up with witty quotes better than we are at avoiding the mistakes of our “good intentions” gone bad. But why is that? Nobody ever thinks their intentions are actually harmful.…
