“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…

“First of all, it is important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make himself…

“In modern Christian writings, though I see much (indeed more than I like) about Mammon, I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would probably…