By Father Stephen Freeman, September 17, 2019 Fr. Alexander Schmemann famously said that sacraments do not make things into something else so much as they reveal things to be what they are. We hear this in St. Basil’s Liturgy when we ask God to “show” the bread and wine to be the Body and Blood of Christ. The Baptismal liturgy does the same, asking God to “show this water…to be the water of redemption, the
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
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 12, 2018 A series of recent conversations with a parishioner turned up the problem of “bookends,” that is, questions of the beginning and the end. It is only natural in our day and age to attack problems in this manner. “How did it start?” is a way of saying, “What is it?” The end, of course, is not so obvious, other than its connection with our insatiable desire to know how
By Michael Haldas Thoughts on Spirituality and Psychology, June 21, 2016 “In a psychological culture, morality and psychology are the only human realities we acknowledge. We do not see nor understand the nature of spiritual things. We are locked in a world of cause and effect and presume that everything works in such a manner. The landscape of psychological causes (and effects) is the world as we choose to see it. But it does not
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
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