Category: The Journey of Faith

The Gift of Hospitality

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 7 Leave a Comment on %s
This delightful gem from the Desert Fathers comes from Benedicta Ward’s The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers (157) There was a saint in Egypt who dwelt in a desert place. Far away from him there was a Manichean who was a priest (at least what they call a priest). Once, when this man was going to visit one of his confederates, night overtook him in the place where the orthodox saint wasā€¦

The Gospel of Progress – and the New Jerusalem

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 38 Leave a Comment on %s
American fans of Monty Python will be familiar with the opening lines of William Blakeā€™s poem, “Jerusalem” (and I apologize to my British readers for such an introduction). The poem was set to music in 1916 and became deeply popular in post-war Britain. The Labour Party adopted it as a theme for the election of 1946. It recalls the legend of Christā€™s visit to England as a child (taken there by St.ā€¦

Healing the Tragic Soul of the Modern West

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 207 Leave a Comment on %s
Fr. Georges Florovsky did far more than forge a path back to the fathers for the Orthodox Church: he also mapped a route for the return of Western Christianity to its own Orthodox roots. Discussing the modern encounter of Orthodoxy with the churches of the West, he wrote: A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new ā€œpolemical theology.ā€ But this tragedy must be re-endured and relived, precisely asā€¦

A Crisis of Virtue – The Good That We Need

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 101 Leave a Comment on %s
C.S. Lewis once said that courage is the ā€œform of every virtue at its testing point.ā€ It is easy to forget that figures such as Lewis, Tolkien, and even Chesterton, did not write during a time of Christian ascendancy. Lewis was denied a chair (a full professorship) at Oxford for years precisely because of his embarrassingly public profession of faith. To the ā€œlearnedā€ sceptics around him, it made him seem ā€œless thanā€¦

The Struggle Against The Normal Life

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 79 Leave a Comment on %s
  Within the Christianity of our time, the great spiritual conflict, unknown to almost all, is between a naturalistic/secular world of modernity and the sacramental world of classical Christianity. The first presumes that a literal take on the world is the most accurate. It tends to assume a closed system of cause and effect, ultimately explainable through science and manageable through technology. Modern Christians, quite innocently, accept this account of the worldā€¦

The Kingdom Within

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 85 Leave a Comment on %s
In December of 1849, the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, stood waiting his turn for execution, having been found guilty of plotting against the Russian Tsar. At the last minute, under instructions from the Tsar, the sentence was commuted from death, to four years in a Siberian prison. Later that day, Dostoevsky wrote a famous letter to his brother, describing the experience. He was shaken and changed to the very core of hisā€¦

A Progressive Marriage

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 22 Leave a Comment on %s
How is your marriage progressing? This simple question is a way of focusing our attention on right-thinking about progress and the Christian life. I posed the question to myself ā€“ I have been married now for 43 years. My first thought was, ā€œWhat would ā€˜progressā€™ in a marriage mean?ā€ Do I love my wife more, or any less? What would more love look like? The truth of marriage is that progress isā€¦

Faith and Rationality – Stumbling Into Paradise

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 45 Leave a Comment on %s
You have decided to buy a new computer. As the good and wise shopper that you are, you begin googling information and gathering recommendations for this so-important purchase. You are being rational. You learn, compare, question and weigh your options. When all is said, and done, you make a decision. Rationality is about our ability to weigh, sort, compare, judge, and the such like. I like to think of it as ourā€¦

The Doors of the Heart

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 32 Leave a Comment on %s
In the summer of 1952, an obscure event took place in London that would have a profound impact on the future of Orthodox Christianity in the English-speaking world. A seventeen-year-old English lad walked through the doors of St. Philip’s Russian Orthodox Church on Buckingham Palace Road (the Church has long since been torn down). Today he is known as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the most important figures in the contemporary Orthodoxā€¦

The Translation of the Faith

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 108 Leave a Comment on %s
There is an Italian proverb: Traduttore, traditore. It means, ā€œtranslator, traitor.ā€ It is the observation that no matter how hard one might try, the translation of one language into another is never more than approximate: there can be no ā€œliteralā€ translation. Every language is, within itself, a universe of relationships between words. There are shades of meaning and associations that simply cannot be moved into another language. When we study a newā€¦