~By Stephen Freeman, May 17, 2023 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 famously
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on July 30, 2021 Metropolitan Nikolaos (Hatzinikolaou) of Mesogaia and Lavreotiki An experience which isn’t genuine produces Christians who, instead of being saved within the Church, feel as though they should save the truth. Instead of discerning the face of Christ in our brother and sister Christians, we see opponents whom we must overcome, or we see ‘our own people’, who have to support our views. Instead of entrusting the state of our soul
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, February 12, 2017 Imagine that you have been sentenced to seven years in a labor camp. The Church is weak, often riddled with spies, while the state proclaims that it is building a better world through its brutal efforts. Many of the laws specifically target the Church and activities within its normal life. Already in your lifetime, you have known thousands who have been executed for nothing more than faith in
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
Hypocrisy and Lies, Mother and Daughter Fire is produced from stone and steel; lying comes from loquacity and gossip. And the lie destroys love. No one who has any sense would say that telling lies is not an important sin. The Holy Spirit has severely condemned it. ‘You destroy those that speak lies,’ says David to God. [Ps 5:7] The mother of lying is hypocrisy, mother and also, often, its substance as well. Hypocrisy in
Three Kinds of Lies There are three kinds of liar: those who lie with their thoughts, those who lie with words and those who lie with their very lives. The liar of thought, for example, is the individual who is suspicious. If he sees two people talking, he immediately imagines they are talking about him. If they break off their conversation, he is convinced they are doing so because they have seen him coming. Whatever
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