St. John Chrysostom described the family as “a little Church.” He presupposed a household comprised of a father, a mother, and children who live in harmony. Of course, families often differ from this pattern, thus complicating, but not invalidating, the principle that the Church is a family and the family is a church. For our purposes, we will address mixed marriages in which one of the parents is Orthodox, the other is Catholic, they were married in the Orthodox Church, and baptized their children Orthodox. We shall see that the unity of the family does not depend on confessional affiliation. It is blessed in the Orthodox Church, and therefore the separation of the spouses at the chalice is inconsistent with the theology of marriage.
Section: Living Tradition
Radical Encounter with the ‘Other’
This article continues a series of the author’s explorations of face and encounter in the writings of Olivier Clément…
Re-Storying the Human Person: Narrative Liturgical Formation
As we are all aware, the Divine Liturgy is our present participation in the life of the age to come, a real encounter with the kingdom of God. St Maximus the Confessor teaches that the liturgy is the site where the grace of the Holy Spirit “transforms, remoulds, and truly remodels [each participant] into a more divine image.” …
Image and Resemblance: Reflections Around Photography
St. John of Damascus, in his Defense of the Holy Icons, mentioned resemblance in the sense of resemblance to the prototype. His main goal was t show that veneration of icons is not a form of idolatry, and to do so, he emphasized the importance of the likeness between the represented person (the prototype) and the icon, distinguishing it from the identity of nature…
Liturgy as Formation: Preparing for the Eucharist—The Cathedral Vigil as Celebrated at New Skete Monastery
For the Orthodox, the liturgy is where the faithful encounter God as a community and seek to draw all into communion with him. For those who privilege liturgy as the source and summit of this encounter, it is the primary way that the faith is experienced, understood, expressed, and transmitted…
Apophaticism and Experience in Orthodox Theology and Quantum Mechanics
The objective of this text is to engage in a comparative analysis of the role apophaticism plays in two very different contexts—Orthodox theology and quantum mechanics. Why quantum mechanics? Isn’t it one of the most successful theories in physics? How could we be ‘apophatic’ about one of the most successful theories of physics, one hundred years after its invention?
Enriching Tradition: Monastic Wisdom Meets Scientific Insight
The relationship of human experience to theology and the tradition it inhabits is more complex and dynamic than we think. While popularly many conceive tradition as a fixed reality into which we must somehow fit our experience, I believe that experience is the driving force that animates our theology and the tradition that has been handed down even today…
Boundless Love
As I was preparing this reflection on the story of Mary of Egypt, I was marveling at the many facets that this story offers when viewed through the lens of our experiences: what has been, what may have been, how the stories are told, and where the light shines through them, the light everlasting, the light of hope that is offered to us all if we are able to see and follow it…
Folk Traditions and the Church: Some Remarks
Night was falling as we entered the church of the Annunciation in Gerakari, a lowland village a few kilometers outside Larissa, in Central Greece. The church is a late nineteenth-century building, with an old wooden ceiling and a rather simple iconostasis, but also with later additions, modern frescoes, a narthex with rabbeted wood and a[…..]
An Ancient Belief Gets a Modern Rebrand
They are everywhere—from handbags to shoes, backsplashes to office cubicles, and even adorning celebrities like Priyanka Chopra. Eye-shaped pendants, or the nazar—a symbol comprised of a series of concentric circles in hues of blue and white found throughout Turkey and Greece—have inspired a multimillion-dollar lifestyle trend…
Exorcism in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese: “And Let My Cry Come Unto You.”
As a child of the 1970s, The Exorcist was the stuff of legend for my friends and me. Older siblings spoke of it in knowing whispers; I often—and unsuccessfully—pleaded my case to my parents, begging for permission to see the movie.
Liturgical ID, Please! Identity’s Ontological, Relational, and Experiential Properties in the Worship and Prayers of the Church
In the 1994 Disney film The Lion King, a particular scene speaks to the importance of recognizing and coming to terms with one’s identity. The scene renders, through the deceased lion king’s verbal exhortation to his son, the protagonist, three of the most insightful theological statements ever made in animation…
Enacting Christian Identity through Liturgy: The Example of New Skete Monastery
How do we understand ourselves as Christians, especially when we gather as a community in liturgy? This essay will briefly explore how the Monks and Nuns of New Skete Monastery have understood and enacted their ecclesial identity through their liturgical expression over the course of their over fifty year history. I will begin by highlighting[…..]
Who Am I? Refocusing the Identity Search
Our society is in the throes of identity politics. Debates about what constitutes identity, what are “acceptable,” “assumed,” and “constructed” identities often reach war-like intensity. The pressure to self-identify within prescribed parameters and the social consequences of choosing a governing identity create a form of social neurosis. And the neurosis is compounded by the currently[…..]
“All You Works of the Lord, Bless the Lord”
There is perhaps no more pressing issue in each of our lives than responding to the core question, “Who am I?”. It is the question that binds all human beings together, regardless of our diverse backgrounds of culture, religion, and social upbringing. Part of the adventure of life, what continues to be a source of[…..]
“Love to the End and Without Exceptions”: Reflections on Christian Identity in the Theology of Mother Maria (Skobtsova)
“Piety, piety, but where is love that moves mountains? More and more I realize and accept that it is the only measure of all things,” wrote Mother Maria Skobtsova in her notebook after a discussion with nuns who were advocating a vision of Christian life as a set of pious practices…
The Apophatic in Orthodox Theology
It is readily agreed, perhaps too readily agreed—both by Orthodox and non-Orthodox—that Orthodox theology is “apophatic,” that it proceeds by denial rather than by affirmation. The Roman Catholic priest Joseph Famerée, very much a friend of Orthodoxy, asserts, “So, it is by indicating what God is not that the theologian most truly teaches. God is[…..]
The Joy of Meeting the Saints in the West
In December 2017, the icon exhibition Saints of the Undivided Church opened at the National Art Museum of Belarus in Minsk. It presented icons of the ancient saints of the West up to the Great Schism of 1054.
Creativity and Holiness: Étienne Gilson and Nikolai Berdyaev on the Artist and the Saint
Writing in Paris in 1931, Russian Orthodox religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noted that “the greatness of creative genius is not correlative to moral perfection.” In the Orthodox religious culture of Berdyaev’s day, the summit of personal moral and religious perfection was found solely in holiness crafted through asceticism and prayer.
Monarchy and the Bible
Kings dominate the story of the Bible, but the scriptural narrative expresses ambivalence towards monarchy. Some years after the people of Israel are rescued from slavery in Egypt and brought to the land God promised them, they begin to desire a king to rule over them. In one sense, the unfolding narrative suggests this desire[…..]
The Resurrection of the Body in Greek Patristic Thought
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. . . . When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of[…..]
The Body in Byzantine Hymnography
“Lord, save our souls!” This end of many liturgical hymns sounds like familiar music to anyone who regularly attends divine services of the Byzantine liturgical tradition. “Glorify God in your body!” instructs Saint Paul, on the other hand (1 Cor. 6:20). Are the two ideas in contradiction?
The Icon and the Body
Iconography is one of the most important ways in which the body is affirmed and understood within a Christian context. This is because of iconography’s inseparable relationship with the incarnation. Both affirm unambiguously that the salvation, regeneration, transfiguration, and deification of everyone and everything depend upon God’s taking on human nature. This, of course, includes[…..]
Gregory of Nyssa and Human Diversity: Image and Likeness
One of the most curious things about Christianity is that, for a religion with a literal human body at its centre, it is perhaps the most bodyphobic of faiths, and the one in which an unreceptiveness to diversity of identity sits in the starkest contrast to core precepts of the theology.
Is Liturgy Working? Secularization, Pluralism, and Christian Formation
Secularization does not necessarily mean a decrease in religiosity. The philosopher Charles Taylor argues that secularization is a migration of religious devotion from institutional allegiances to other channels. This is a powerful explanatory dynamic.
Olivier Clément, Theologian of Modernity
Please allow me to begin with a digression of a personal nature. When I shared the title of my contribution, it was suggested that I identify the works of Olivier Clément upon which my efforts directly depended. I replied that I would refer to several of his works.
Sacred Atheism, or Atheism in the Service of Beauty
On the Cross of Our Lord
What does our Lord mean when he says, “If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself”—you must “disown” yourself—“and take up your cross and follow me?” (Mark 8:34) These words form the basis for a living faith, and therefore the basis for an authentic experience and life with the living God.
Thoughts on Suffering and Death
Writing about suffering and death can be a delicate undertaking, since both are connected to so much emotion and so many doctrines. Many received ideas about these subjects arose in the pre-scientific era, when perceptions of medicine were deeply mixed with superstitions and were often based on misinterpretation of various sacred texts. I am going[…..]
Maxime Kovalevsky’s Legacy in the Realm of Liturgical Music
The 1930s saw the beginning of a deeply creative ecclesial movement in France known as the Église catholique orthodoxe de France (ECOF). Born of the encounter between the new Russian immigrants to France and a group of French Catholics who sought a return to the tradition of the undivided church of the early Roman empire,[…..]
A Defense of the Orthodox Organ
Before I was a teacher, a mother, or much of anything, really, I was a pianist. My initial piano lessons were the result of a Greek mother’s pragmatism: my older brother wanted piano lessons, and if she was driving one of us, she was driving us both. But I fell in love, and begged my[…..]
Toward an American Liturgical Sound: Vladimir Morosan and the “Appalachian” Paschal Tradition
A few years ago, Vladimir Morosan composed an unusual piece of music based on the pentatonic scale, a version of the Paschal Troparion in what might be called an “Appalachian” style. A simple enough story—but as always, there is a backstory.
Mission and Culture
“I, John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like[…..]
Holy Tradition: Giving and Receiving
It is a truism that Orthodox are traditional. But what do we mean by “tradition”? More specifically, how do we differentiate between “Holy Tradition” and tradition as mere habit or formalized custom? Orthodox believers frequently use the terms interchangeably, confusing the capital “t” variety with the lowercase “t” one, and all too often, this confusion[…..]
A Tragic Estrangement: Reading the Florovsky-Schmemann Correspondence
Thoughtful readers will feel some melancholy upon finishing On Christian Leadership: The Letters of Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky (1947–1955), but this should not discourage anyone from reading this good book. Universally acknowledged as theologians of the first order, Fathers Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky left significant legacies. Each produced a sizable collection of writings[…..]