Category: Culture
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How Vulnerable is Your Life?
Young parents quickly discover a level of vulnerability they had not known before a child came into their world. With the birth of a child, under most normal circumstances, your heart becomes extremely vulnerable. You discover that you’ve never loved anything so much and the fragility of their lives becomes, sometimes, all too obvious. I’m…
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Prayer to My Guardian Angel – A Post Revisited
WordPress provides a fair amount of information to its bloggers – it gives you a chance to see some of what works and occasionally why. Then there are mysteries. One of my mysteries is the popularity of this particular post which first went up last January. Since then it has generated over 2800 views –…
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Why The Small Things Matter
Perhaps one of the greatest disservices done to Christians by the spate of “Left Behind” novels and the like, and the romanticism that is inherent in the drama depicted – is that it makes the true struggle undergone by Christians seem trivial by comparison. When the small actions, little choices for kindness, forgiveness, joy, comfort…
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Communion with Christ and the Union of Marriage
One of the clearest images of the relationship we have with Christ is that of marriage between a man and a woman. St. Paul makes reference to this in Ephesians 5: So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated…
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Music and Scenes from the “Desert”
One of the better known monasteries in Russian history is the Valaam monastery. Taken over by government authorities during the time of the Communists and used for other purposes, it has been returned today to the Church and is growing into a full-functioning, thriving monastery, one of the “deserts” where spiritual warfare on behalf of…
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Music from Orthodox Georgia
Among the older Orthodox nations in the world is the Republic of Georgia. Their local traditions include many saints, wonderful churches, and some of the most hauntingly beautiful music anywhere in the Orthodox world. This is a small clip from a Georgian monastery. Enjoy.
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Christian Atheism
The title for this post sounds like an oxymoron, and, of course, it is. How can one be both an atheist and a Christian? Again, I am wanting to push the understanding of the one-versus-two-storey universe. In the history of religious thought, one of the closest versions to what I am describing as a “two-storey”…
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Living a One Storey Life
I have chosen to use language of the “first and second storey” to describe the kind of bifurcation that the modern world has experienced over the past several centuries. Its results have been to smash the religious world into “sacred” and “secular” and to make believing both harder and disbelief more natural. Thus, to many…
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The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest (a convert from Anglicanism) and perhaps the greatest modern (?) poet of the English Language (ok, he’s my favorite). My second daughter, Khouria Kathryn, made me aware of this poem. Hopkins is wonderfully sacramental in his poetry – God permeates his words and the world his words come…
Thank you for this lovely reflection, Father Stephen. My earliest memory, which was before I was walking so very early,…