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Democratic Madness

07/19/2019

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, January 30, 2017 Dostoevsky’s The Demons tells the story of a revolution within the context of a small village and a handful of personalities. The strange mix of philosophy and neurosis, crowd psychology and fashionable disdain for tradition all come together in the madness of a bloodbath. It is a 19th century Helter Skelter that presciently predicted the century to come. Our own version of the same sickness plays out with less bloodshed though with similar passion. This

Face to Face

07/05/2019

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, May 2, 2015 Nothing about the human body is as intimate as the face. We generally think of other aspects of our bodies when we say “intimate,” but it is our face that reveals the most about us. It is the face we seek to watch in order to see what others are thinking, or even who they are. The importance of the face is emphasized repeatedly in the Scriptures. In

The Thirteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Looking Like Christmas

11/27/2017

By Father Stephen Freeman One of the most striking features of the Gospels is the frequent response of the Disciples after the resurrection of Christ: doubt. I have always been sympathetic to the doubts and hesitations that accompanied their experience during the ministry of Christ. They are almost endearing in their inability to grasp what Christ is all about. However, the same inability to grasp things after the resurrection seems to carry with it all kinds of

PRAYING WITH ICONS AND STATUES

07/19/2017

Icons and statuary make important contributions to any spiritual environment that nurtures prayer. Morning after morning, I used to watch a ninety-eight-year-old woman walk brightly into church and take her usual seat. She would turn her head slightly to the right and give a nod to the statue of Mary and then turn her head a good deal more to the left and wink at the statue of St. Joseph. She would then sit down

Meditation and Worship (Part XI)

09/21/2016

The icons seen on church walls are not merely images or paintings: an icon is a focus of real presence. St John Chrysostom advises us, before we start praying, to take our stand in front of an icon and to shut our eyes. He says ‘shut your eyes’, because it is not by examining the icon, by using it as a visual aid, that we are helped by it to pray. It is not a

ON THE USE OF MATERIAL THINGS

01/15/2016

We are made up of soul and body; the two cannot be separated in our conduct. Let the physical therefore come to your aid: Christ knew our weakness and for our sake used words and gestures, spittle and earth as media. For our sake He let His power flow from the fringe of His garment (Matthew 9: 20; 14: 36), from the handkerchiefs or aprons that were carried away from the apostle Paul’s body (Acts

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Meaning and Message of Forests and Trees in the Christian Tradition (Part IV)

09/04/2014

Restoring this Christian unitive vision of creation as a cosmic sacrament points us to the Iconic Tree. The Iconic Tree The mystery of life is that even the life of fallen nature partakes somehow of the Life beyond life, even though without redemption access to the Tree of Life remains blocked by separation, sin and death. As a great saint of the early Church, Dionysios the Areopagite wrote in his enormously influential work, The Divine

Archive

Democratic Madness

Face to Face

The Thirteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Looking Like Christmas

PRAYING WITH ICONS AND STATUES

Meditation and Worship (Part XI)

ON THE USE OF MATERIAL THINGS

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Meaning and Message of Forests and Trees in the Christian Tradition (Part IV)

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