This last May St. Ninian’s Anglican Church in Scarborough, Ontario was deconsecrated by the Anglican bishop of Toronto and returned to secular use.  Usually the deconsecration of Anglican churches is of no interest to me, unless they are nearby and are being offered for sale at bargain prices (which of course they never are), but this church was different.  It was in this church that I was received into the Anglican Communion,…

Orthodox people love symbols—we even find symbols in places where they don’t really exist, such as when we say that the Gospel Entrance in the Divine Liturgy is a symbol of Christ going out to preach.  (Liturgical footnote:  an entrance of someone coming in is unlikely to be a symbol of someone going out).  And it is important to understand what a symbol really is, at least in the patristic mindset.  For…

In reflecting on the recent legal overturn of Roe vs. Wade in the United States, I am acutely aware of my status as a foreigner here in Canada living north of all the action.  The decisions of the United States Supreme Court have no legal force in Canada, though of course whatever happens down south has cultural reverberations north of the border. Here in the Great White North abortion is entirely legal…

Among the many things that Christians say that annoy people is their assertion that Christianity is the only true religion.  Given the tremendous number of alternatives to Christianity on the religious market today, the assertion savours of intolerable arrogance, blindness, insensitivity, and self-righteous conceit.  “The only true religion?”  Who do these Christian people think they are?  In the words of one critic, “That’s an outrageous thing to accept”. The outrageousness of it…

One of the first things that clergy do after entering the church on Sunday morning for Divine Liturgy is to put on special clothes called “vestments”.  They are highly stylized and every priest wears the same things:  first the priest puts on a long vestment called a stichar or sticharion, usually white in colour, which falls down to his ankles; then he puts on his stole which hangs down his chest to…

Everyone once in a while one finds a book that is illuminating, easy and fun to read, opens doors, and leaves you larger than you were before.  Fr. John McGuckin’s St. Gregory of Nazianzus:  An Intellectual Biography is such a book.  I read it before (it was published by SVS Press in 2001) and I recently re-read it.  It is (if he will forgive the comparison) like re-watching Bogey’s Casablanca—McGuckin’s St. Gregory…