It is a recurring popular trope, especially in some Protestant circles, to dismiss the Church Fathers on the grounds that they were “seduced” or “corrupted” by Greek philosophy and that their understanding of the faith displays the cultural milieu of the day, rather than proper biblical exegesis. Even many scholars have claimed that attempting to read the Bible as the Fathers did…
Plenty has been written about the Pew Research Center’s second Religious Landscape Study, published in 2014. Relatively little commentary has focused on what the findings tell us about Orthodox Christians in America. In part, the lack of attention is due to the very small sample size of Orthodox believers in the study — so small that the margin for error is somewhere…
Public Orthodoxy’s recent post by Giacomo Sanfilippo on “Conjugal Friendship” claimed to take a postmodern approach to sacramental conjugality in Orthodox Christianity, but ended up falling into ethnophyletic and gnostic heresies from an Orthodox standpoint.
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,…