What qualities make a Christian teacher? As I read about Saint Macrina, I find myself thinking that I would like to be a teacher more like her. Macrina responds to God’s great compassion in several ways: in action, by her philanthropic work and evangelical poverty; in teaching, by influencing and leading others to a life[…..]
Section: Cloud of Witnesses
Tangling with Orthodox Tradition in the Modern West: Natural Law, Homosexuality, and Living Tradition
I find the subject of homosexuality painful. I find this subject difficult. I do not normally comment on how anything affects me personally in an academic context. But this is an exception. At least part of what brought me to Orthodoxy more than twenty-five years ago from my native evangelical Anglicanism was a combination of[…..]
Father Pavel Florensky and the Sacrament of Love
Father Pavel Florensky’s “Friendship,” structurally and thematically the culminating letter of the twelve which comprise his 1914 book The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, has proven a challenge to his readers from the time that he first wrote it as part of his master’s thesis to the present. A cursory reading in translation allows[…..]
The Two Princesses
Amid the diversity of twentieth-century Orthodox saints, the stories of two women, Princess Alice of Greece and Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, illustrate how lives that begin in high privilege can develop into service and even martyrdom. Contemporary discourse tends toward a negative view of privilege, especially privilege bestowed by accident of birth. What it[…..]
Contested Bones
In the woods about a half-hour’s drive from Yekaterinburg, Russia, is a gentle depression covered with moss and grass, its slope smoothed over by time. It is the site of an abandoned mine shaft, surrounded by a wooden-roofed causeway. The gilded domes and crosses of Holy Royal Martyrs Monastery emerge through the foliage, located about[…..]
Sanctity and Saints
Every day of the church year is marked by the memory of saints. We come across references to the saints in the pages of Scripture. We celebrate the memory of the apostles, the martyrs, the righteous reverend, holy bishops, pious rulers, and so on. Local churches themselves perform canonizations with various frequency. But, as often[…..]
The Lives and Afterlives of St. John of Kronstadt
That saints are products of not only the societies that they lived in but also the ones they continue to engage, is by now a truism. It is not only a matter of making it into the menaia and once in, always in. Servicebooks can be altered. To use the metaphor of a modern museum,[…..]
Tanqilria Tanqilrianun/Holy Things for the Holy: Society and Sanctity Among the Yup’ik People
Unlike the regions of “Old World” Orthodoxy—that is, the parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and India where Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches have long existed —the lands of the New World do not yet have many local saints to laud on their calendars. The great heroes of the faith — the[…..]
When the Saints Go Marching In
The landmark recording of the American gospel hymn “When the Saints Go Marching In” was produced in 1938 by Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. Undoubtedly, Americans over the age of thirty can immediately hear the tune in their heads: “Oh, when the saints go marching in… Lord, I want to be in that number, when[…..]