Author: Nicole M. Roccas
Becoming the Cave: Merry Christmas from Time Eternal
Dear Time Eternalites, Just a quick note in between baking and cleaning to wish you and your families, friends, and enemies a blessed and meaningful Feast of Christ’s Nativity. Wherever you are, whatever this Christmas looks like for you, I pray you encounter the manifested love of God in our humble, earthly realities. May we and all creation endeavor…
Solitude, Solstices and Anticipation: A Birthday at the End of the Nativity Fast (guest post)
This morning, Nic Hartmann is back on the Time Eternal blog with a reflection on having a birthday that falls at the end of Nativity. I enjoyed reading this and thinking about my own internal metaphors and temporal “landmarks” that mark my way through this Fast. Whether we have a birthday during this season or not, the temptation…
Conversion as Paradigm Shift: Why Conversion is So Hard to Explain
Lately, one of the dominant themes to surface during my parish’s post-Liturgy coffee hour is the complicated nature of conversion. Newcomers ask me and other “converts” (of course, we’re all converts! But you know what I mean…) why we became Orthodox, and many of us find it’s simply too difficult to explain our reasons. As one friend has pointed…
“Wrought in the Stillness of God”: St. Ignatius of Antioch on the Unexpected Jesus (Guest Post)
I asked Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick to stop by the Time Eternal blogathon and share something with us about St. Ignatius. Why? Because today (December 20) is St. Ignatius’ feast day–AND because Fr. Andrew’s most recent book is about him, and because I wanted to know what St. Ignatius had to say about the birth of Christ. Why…
The Joy of Waiting: Time and Psalmody in St. Benedict (Guest Post)
The first time I guest posted on Time Eternal last October, I explored the problem of impatience and its connection to the Fall. I noted that impatience amounts to a disordered relationship to time—a belief that we should decide when to receive God’s gifts, rather than waiting for His appointed moment. As we approach the Lord’s Nativity I…
Time and Exegesis: Reflections on Contemporary Orthodox Approaches to Scripture (Guest Post)
Today I’ve asked my friend, Dr. Miriam DeCock, to reflect on how time/temporality shapes her academic field of training. I first met Miriam when we both started teaching at the Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College in Toronto. She’s since moved on to new opportunities (and is about to head off to a postdoc in Denmark!), so…
Advent in Prison: Rethinking Christmas with Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Since December 1, I’ve been listening to the audio version of God is in the Manger, an Advent devotional comprised of excerpts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer letters and writings from prison. This is a book I often read through this time of year. Bonhoeffer isn’t Orthodox but his life and death under the Nazi regime are an important witness to Christianity in…
“What do we make of this day?” Reflecting on the Anniversary of Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s Repose
Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the falling asleep of Fr. Alexander Schmemann. I would like to follow up on this occasion with some poignant thoughts from one of his lesser-known works, The Liturgy of Death, a compilation of four talks Schmemann gave in 1979 at a summer institute at SVOTS. In these talks, Schmemann traced the historical…
Two Orthodox Devotionals I’m Reading in 2019
How are we holding up, Time Eternalites? It’s kind of an interesting point in the Nativity Fast–the messy middle is slowly starting to give way to something else. The light at the end of the tunnel can be seen–for better, for worse. The “crunch time” of holiday deadlines is becoming real, but so too is the immanence of…