January is such a wonderful month; the great feast of Theophany following the joyous celebration of the Nativity of our Lord; new beginnings with the new calendar year; the full force and beauty of winter (despite the threats of El…

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6 Prior to my trip to the 1998 Midwest Parish Life Conference I had been working on another…

“Today religion, or at any rate doctrine, is not with the majority of people a dominant issue and does not arouse major passions… Modern historians are, I think, retrojecting into the past {Church history} the sentiments of the present age…

“…you should be living a good Orthodox Christian life, one with a level of asceticism proper to your station as lay persons. Asceticism comes from the Greek (ahs-kee-tees-mos) meaning ‘a whole system of personal discipline for the purpose of combating…

“[People] are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that [a person] can be…