Archive

The Eighteenth Day of Christmas Advent: Blood Brothers of the Incarnation

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, August 8, 2016  My childhood in the 1950’s had the innocence of the time, fed by stories of our elders and the clumsy movies. We played soldiers (everyone’s father had been in the Second World War) and “Cowboys and Indians.” Despite the clear bias of the movies and the slanted propaganda that passed for history, almost everyone wanted to be an Indian. Cowboys never seemed terribly romantic, while the Indians clearly

The Eighth Day of Christmas Advent: The Elder of love, forgiveness and discernment

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, November 22, 2016 Elder Iakovos Tsalikis (5/11/1920-21/11/1991) By Alexandros Christodoulou Our age and today’s culture has, unfortunately moved away from the vision and pursuit of sanctity. The Orthodox faith is based on the presence of the saints. Without these, our Church is on the path towards secularization. Naturally, as we know from Scripture, God alone is holy, and sanctity derives from our relationship with Him, and therefore sanctity is theocentric rather

The Communion of Friends

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, November 22, 2016  You meet someone and like them. You slowly get to know them. Conversation and sharing, listening and learning, a picture or a reality begin to emerge. You think about them when they’re away. You’re aware that you matter to them as well. The thought of anything hurting them is painful. This is friendship. We easily reduce friendship to a set of shared emotions. Why we like someone else, we

Saving Knowledge

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, November 28, 2016  I have often used the example of riding a bicycle as an image of knowing God. There’s no difficulty learning how to ride if you don’t mind falling off for a while. But no matter how many years you have ridden, you cannot describe for someone else how you know what you know. But you know it. I also suspect that if you thought too much about riding a bicycle while you were riding

Christ and the Social Problem

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, December 13, 2017 † Archimandrite Georgios Kapsanis, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Gregoriou The more that people are cleansed of the passions, the greater their capacity for real communion with God and other people. Those who take a romantic and external view of the human person transfer wickedness from the person onto society, which is why they proclaim that any improvement in society will bring with it an improvement in

Seeing and Believing – A Noetic Life Part 2

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, September 2, 2016  “I see what you mean.” Language holds many secrets that we ignore. Some of the secrets are quite old. If we pay proper attention, we are able to discover things that we already know, but did not yet know that we knew. The phrase, “Now I see,” or other various uses of “seeing” as a form of “knowing,” is quite ancient in its insight. The Greek word for

The Three Saints of Pain and Hope

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, November 29, 2017 Dr. Nikolaos Koios, Content Coach of Pemptousia It’s a profound conviction of the Orthodox Church that every epoch has its own saints and there’s not a single age without them. In every era, the saints are proof and demonstration of the grace of Christ, the love of the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit, in place and time, among us. When saints leave this earth for their

Rest for Your Soul

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, December 31, 2016  If…then… Among the most alluring ideas in our lives are the notions of cause and effect, performance and award. Nothing seems more soothing than the simple promise that doing one thing leads to the reward of the other. It is predictable, subject to control, clearly delineates the rules of reward and punishment and makes obvious who deserves what. Nothing could be neater. The limit to this idea comes

Ex Nihilo (1)

By Fr John Breck, February 1, 2022 In the very beginning, there was nothing. Nothing at all. There was neither time nor space, neither matter nor energy, neither life nor death. There were no galaxies, no stars or planets; nor were there molecules, atoms, or any of the vast array of subatomic particles that constitute physical reality as we know it. There was nothing. The concept of “nothingness” is impossible for us to grasp. “Nothingness”

Beneath Her Compassion

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, November 19, 2016  Among the greater mysteries of the New Testament are those surrounding the Mother of God. A large segment of modern Christianity has become tone deaf in this regard, a result of centuries of antagonism towards certain aspects of older tradition. It is a deafness that grieves my heart, primarily in that it represents a great gulf within the broader experience of the faith. A few years after my