Archive

Hope in the Darkness: Two Kinds of Darkness

Darkness is a good and necessary teacher. It is not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. First, like Ezekiel the prophet, we must eat the scroll that is “lamentation, wailing, and moaning” in our belly, and only eventually becomes sweet as honey (see Ezekiel 2:9-10; 3:1-3). By the time most people reach middle age, they’ve had days where life has lost its meaning, they no longer connect with an inner sense of

Truth, Lies and Icons

By Father Stephen Freeman, June 9, 2015 As verbal beings, we live in a world of icons. We experience the world in an iconic fashion. A major difficulty for us is that we have lost the vocabulary of iconic reality. We have substituted the language of photography. The dissonance between reality and our photographic assumptions has led us to doubt both. Man is an iconographer and needs to re-learn what that means. +++ Franz Kafka

The Unmoral Christian Revisited

By Father Stephen Freeman, January 31, 2015  My article, The Un-moral Christian, along with You’re Not Getting Better, have continued to generate conversation around the internet, and within parishes. At least that’s the impression I get from numerous conversations, emails, social media, and even phone calls. Most of those conversations seem to be serious and are engaging the question of how Orthodox Christians should think about the moral life. A recent conversation in my parish has yielded

Analyzing Our Thoughts and Feelings (III)

Evagrius describes the second vice of lust as follows: “The demon of unchastity is concerned with greed for the body. Those who lead a life of abstinence find themselves more exposed to his assaults than others. For the demon would have them stop practicing this virtue. Anyway, so he would have them believe, it yields no profit. It is typical of this demon to play out before them impure actions, to dirty them, and finally