I believe that the church in which I was baptized and brought up ‘is’ in very truth ‘the Church’, i.e. ‘the true’ Church and the ‘only’ true Church . . . I am therefore compelled to regard all other Christian churches as deficient, and in many cases can identify these deficiencies accurately enough. Therefore, for me, Christian reunion is simply universal conversion to Orthodoxy.…
Sunday of the Adoration of the Holy Cross, 2012 In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. In today’s reading from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, we read his further elaboration of the dominant theme of the work, namely, the priesthood of Christ. The book, being written to the Hebrew people, that is,…
Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, 2012 In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Every single person, whether a man, a woman, or a child, has been given by God a deep, primal longing for Him. We generally go through our days thinking of our desires for other things: I want breakfast. I want…
Rejoice, nerds and ascetics alike (and you know who you are), for your humble servant, the Irrev. Fr. Andrew, is passing on to you in tradition this, the recipe for the finest vegetarian chili you will ever eat. (If it is not, then that means you’re doing it wrong.) This recipe originally started with a certain Mr. Gorski with whom I shared living space…
If you can make any sense out of the headline for this post, You Might Be a Digital Native. In any event, this is merely a reminder that, now with the addition of a Twitter account, I’ve completely signed on to the Great Trifecta of Social Media. (Hm. Now the phrase social medium occurs to me, and I am left with an image of…
This morning, after Matins, I high-tailed it across New Jersey over to Newark Liberty International Airport, pulled up to the Departures area at Terminal A, and picked up a man holding a tray of coffee. We drove to the airport parking, picked a spot, and proceeded to chat for about ninety minutes, about sixty of which I caught on tape. The man was (as…
In my previous post, a comment from a Protestant challenged me to argue for Lent purely from Scripture, also saying that his own experience of Lent, like Mark Galli’s, was pretty miserable. That led me to consider that I actually had left several important things out in the previous post, most especially touching upon the question of the dualism of Evangelicals and what that…
Update: This post is now available as an audio recording at Ancient Faith Radio. Mark Galli recently posted an article entitled Giving Up Self-Discipline for Lent which is actually a fairly fascinating look into what Lenten ascetical effort looks like from within a Pietist tradition. Pietism is, in brief, the belief that the private relationship with God is paramount and that doctrine and shared…
