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…

What are “traditional family values” and what is their role in the life of a Christian? First of all, it is important to understand what is not meant by the term “traditional family values”.  In particular, the term does not mean that the family is the most important thing in life, or that one should put the family first before everything else.  Members of the Mafia might perhaps think so, as the…

The clergy friends I know are a diverse lot.  Some are Orthodox, some are Protestant, some are Canadian, and some are American.  But when I talk to them of late, I find that they all tell the same story:  at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, they all lost a sizeable portion of their congregation, and all for the same reason:  they couldn’t please everybody. During the pandemic, as the clergy struggled…

The year 1453 marked a very significant event in the life of the Orthodox Church, for that was the year that the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, effectively bringing to an end the long thousand year reign of the Christian Roman Empire (also known as “Byzantium”).  Of course by that time, most of the empire had already fallen to the Ottomans, Constantinople and the little area surrounding it being the…

The ancient world was built on three fundamental realities—foundations which persist to this day—and Christ overturned all of them.  No wonder His Church was considered both radical and dangerous. The first reality was the foundation of family.  Loyalty to one’s family—and by extension to one’s clan, tribe, or nation—was paramount, and trumped every other personal loyalty.  That was because in a big and dangerous world, extended family was often the only place…

In our last blog piece we examined the fundamental fact about the Church’s essential nature—viz. that the Church was the actual Body of Christ, the manifestation of His presence in this age.  Here I would like to examine another fundamental fact about the Church—viz. that in this age it is destined to suffer. The suffering of the Christians in this age is not simply a sociological fact, something which given a different…