The following is Part III of a talk I gave on April 2nd at the St. Emmelia Orthodox Homeschooling Conference at the Antiochian Village. The full talk is entitled “The Transfiguration of Place: An Orthodox Christian Vision of Localism.” Read Part I and Part II. There are six parts in all. We use the word community to mean a lot of different things these…
I sometimes encounter folks who tell me that they are “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). I wish I asked more often what exactly that is supposed to mean, though I am usually held back from asking by a strong suspicion that such a statement is not meant to undergo any sort of scrutiny. But what does it mean, anyway? This post is a reflection…
Ecology was never particularly a subject I thought I would find myself thinking too much about, much less writing about, but it seems to keep coming to the fore for me, especially as I’ve begun to apprehend more of its theological, rather than secular/political, significance. Framing this theological vision in terms of “the story of home” (which is one literal rendering of oikologia, from…
Sunday of the Forefathers of Christ, December 13, 2009 Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick Emmaus, Pennsylvania In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. If you follow the news, you know that this past week and in this coming week, the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, is hosting the United Nations Climate Change Conference. During…
The image above is of the Knauss Homestead, one of the founding family homes in Emmaus, established in 1777. It was the patriarch of the clan, Sebastian Knauss, who first donated land in 1759 on which Emmaus was to be built. The Homestead property borders directly on that of St. Paul Orthodox Church, where I am pastor. It’s probably a decent assumption that we…