Orthodoxy Archives - Saint Sophia

The Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas: Unmediated Grace

03/16/2025

~By Stephen Freeman, March 30, 2013 This Sunday the Orthodox Calendar commemorates St. Gregory Palamas – perhaps the most significant theologian and teacher of the late Byzantine period. He particularly is important when considering the nature of the Christian experience of God. Orthodoxy believes that it is truly possible to know God though He remains unknowable. The mystery of this true knowledge constitutes the heart of St. Gregory’s work. I first encountered St. Gregory’s writings

The First Friday of Great Lent. 1st Salutations

03/07/2025

Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis ‘I shall open my mouth and it will be filled with praise and I shall pour out words to the Queen and Mother; I shall be seen radiantly keeping the festival and shall joyfully sing her wonders’ (irmos, ode 1, Akathistos Hymn). As the voice of the Church and of us, also, the holy hymnographer tells us that he’ll sing, he’ll shout, about Our Lady, who is the Queen and Mother. This

The Temptations of Identity

02/24/2025

~By Father Stephen Freeman, March 13, 2023 “Who am I?” The question of who we are is deceptively simple. When we begin to press the question, almost every answer that we can give is something other than the self. When we leave the (ideally) intimate communion of our early years and begin to forge our way into a social setting, an uncertainty begins to be our social companion. This questioning of identity (which is fairly normal) becomes

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Happy Thanksgiving!

11/28/2024

What is So Orthodox at Thanksgiving? By Father Joseph Allen There is no “feast” that seems more “American” than Thanksgiving. Many of us Orthodox also recognize this holiday in some sort of way. Usually we say that it is a day in which “they” remember that the Pilgrims landed in this country. Of course, the “they” that we use in such a sentence refers to any of the non-Orthodox Americans that we live with. And

Face to Face—Beholding God

11/11/2024

My mind wandered back to these thoughts as I pondered the growing phenomenon of “selfies.” Of course, the “selfie” is the passion-driven distortion of the theology of the face – existence as ego. For the mystery of the face is not to look at myself, but to look at the other. You are God’s “selfie.” Ponder it. Nothing about the human body is as intimate as the face. We generally think of other aspects of

The Tradition of Being Human

07/19/2024

By Father Stephen Freeman, July 31, 2014 Being human is a cultural event. No one is human by themselves and no one becomes human without the help of those around them. This is so obvious it should not need to be stated, but contemporary man often imagines himself to be his own creation. The exercise of individual freedom is exalted as the defining characteristic of our existence: “I am what I choose to be.” To suggest that

The Sixth Friday of Great Lent: An Atonement of Shame – Orthodoxy and the Cross

04/15/2022

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 6, 2017 Some decades ago in my early (Anglican) priesthood, a parishioner brought a crucifix back from South America. The question for me as a priest was whether I would accept the crucifix as a gift and place it in the Church. I like crucifixes, my taste was always towards the Catholic direction. But, you have to bear in mind that Spanish/Latin crucifixes have a tendency to be, well, rather

Prayers for the Dead

02/25/2022

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, May 21, 2016 The Orthodox pray for the departed. The most pressing prayer within the liturgies appointed for this purpose is for God to forgive their sins. We say, “For no one lives and does not sin, for You only are without sin….” This is easily misunderstood, but it goes to the very heart of the mystery of our relationship with God. The same sentiment, interestingly, is offered in the prayers

A Simple, Great Soul

02/21/2022

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 1, 2016 For a variety of reasons, I have been spending a fair amount of time with A.I. Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who died in 2008. I am working through a collection of his writings and have been watching videos on his life along with detailed interviews. If any man lived through the maelstrom of the 20th century, it was he. Born in 1918 to a pious, Orthodox family, he

A Bunch of Stuff We Don’t Know

02/11/2022

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 25, 2016 Reading discussions about life after death, it is easy to get the impression that people actually know what they’re talking about, that perhaps they have been there, seen what goes on and therefore authoritatively opine on the nature of things. But, the truth is that we mostly don’t know. We have a few things given to us in Scripture, and even those few things are often somewhat cryptic

Archive

The Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas: Unmediated Grace

The First Friday of Great Lent. 1st Salutations

The Temptations of Identity

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Happy Thanksgiving!

Face to Face—Beholding God

The Tradition of Being Human

The Sixth Friday of Great Lent: An Atonement of Shame – Orthodoxy and the Cross

Prayers for the Dead

A Simple, Great Soul

A Bunch of Stuff We Don’t Know

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