On April 2, 2017, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option debuted at number seven for hardcover non-fiction on the New York Times’ bestseller list (promptly to drop from the list the following week). This new offering from Dreher is a summary of his life experience, a sort of manifesto for the conservative Christian seeking meaning in a world inundated by progressive agendas, commercialism,…
Writing in Evangelical flagship publication Christianity Today, Ed Stetzer, who is a professor at Wheaton and heads up the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism, made some guesses about why Evangelicals become Orthodox Christians in “Hank Hanegraaff’s Switch to Eastern Orthodoxy, Why People Make Such Changes, and Four Ways Evangelicals Might Respond“: The obvious question is what draws evangelicals to more liturgical traditions—and…
Hello, blog readers and email list subscribers! I just wanted to give you a couple quick updates in case you hadn’t yet heard: — The revised, expanded edition of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape is now available for pre-order. Wondering what’s new? Read all about that here. Click here to place your order and…
HOW OUR DEPARTED ONES LIVE: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH. By Monk Mitrophan. Translated, Archpriest John R. Shaw. Jordanville: Holy Trinity Publications, 2015. 452 pps. ISBN-10: 088465401X The Wall Street Journal ran a headlining piece on March 31, 2011 entitled, “The Last Laugh,” that anecdotally reported on a sea change in the conduct of funerals in the United States in which “families…
One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years is the growth of all kinds of “Post-_______” Christianity. By this I mean varieties of Christianity that are all generally within the Evangelical Protestant genre yet explicitly do not embrace any particular tradition. Typically, what this looks like is something recognizably Evangelical yet with a potpourri of different doctrinal, worship and pastoral emphases…
Various media reports and editorials have described the controversies before, during, and after the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, recently held during Pentecost on the island of Crete. Some have concluded that the Council’s difficulties were the result of geopolitics, and can therefore be explained away as little more than an ecclesial version of the larger political and cultural…
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. —John 12:32 Ascension Day is possibly the most forgotten of the great feasts of the Lord. Why? In part because, unlike all the other feasts of the same rank, it can never fall on a Saturday or Sunday. Forty days after Pascha is always a Thursday,…
Today I ran across this fascinating piece over at First Things by Richard J. Mouw: “Mormons Approaching Orthodoxy” (“Orthodoxy” here is what we might call “small-O orthodoxy”). In this, Mouw, the former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, makes observations about his relationship with Mormons that resulted from his participation in years of Evangelical-Mormon dialogue, which he uses to interpret statements made by…
I recently came across Paul Ladouceur’s translation of an article by Vladimir Lossky on “The Doctrine of Grace in the Orthodox Church,” published in the St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2014). The whole article contains matters of interest to readers here, but I’d just like to highlight its inclusion of a rare statement by Lossky on his understanding of ecumenical…
Editorial introduction: Here is a follow-up response from Dr. Nicholas Marinides commenting on the reply he received from Coptic author Mina Soliman on his piece from earlier this week, “Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and Non-Chalcedonian Heterodoxy.” For the full context, you’ll want to take a look at the previous posts: Read Dr. Marinides’s initial post. Read Mina Solimon’s response. Thanks Mina, for taking the…