Three things are necessary. We should have our mind in heaven; our heart should be the throne of God; and our mouth should be a church.
Stem Cell Research: Aspects from the Orthodox Christian Perspective Abstract In this short paper I want to throw a little light on Stem Cell Research from an Orthodox Christian ethical point of view. Those who are in favour of embryonic stem cell research recognize that they balance in the moral dilemma between the destruction of human embryos and the treatment of already living patients. But, the destruction of human embryos is not acceptable in any kind of research, treatment and therapy from an ethical point of view. In contrary the use of somatic (adult) stem cells in research and therapies would be a welcome alternative choice and ethically acceptable practice. Introduction Many scientists, coming from human and law sciences mainly, ask often why theologians are ...
Foucault considers the view which examines authority as something which arises from social institutions to be wrong. Authority extends far beyond institutions. The existence of centralized mechanisms of power is the result of a series of relations of authority/impositions which differentiate children from adults, students from teachers or families and subjects or citizens from the administration. Relationships of authority enter into all mechanisms and institutions, with the result that their existence is not restricted to these. For Foucault, the notion of the political is the sum total of the power relations in a society which are equivalent to relations of authority. Authority is not a form of merchandise; it is not something which can be acquired and then transferred. According to ...
Justice redeems souls from death, it’s the guide to what is good, because the start of the good path is to act justly. Those who pursue justice love God. Justice fortifies those who practice it and is the rule by which we should measure every action in our lives.
The new heresies which led to the Second Ecumenical Council After the end of the First Ecumenical Council, some other heresies appeared. which misunderstood not only the Trinitarian doctrine, but also Christological and Pneumatological one. The fathers of these heresies were Macedonius, Marcellus, Eunomius and Apollinarius. Macedonius I was the bishop of Constantinople during the mid-fourth century. He was an Arian, and with the support of Emperor Constantius II, the Semi-Arian party was able to install him as the bishop of Constantinople. Macedonius had been appointed Bishop of Constantinople after the deposition and subsequent murder of Paul (a Nicene), but was himself in turn deposed by the Synod of Constantinople in 360 A.D.. Macedonius had the temerity to teach blasphemously of the ...
How is it possible for your children to become good people when you yourselves often become angry in front of them and swear by the holy things? When you take what’s not yours and cheat other people? When you steal and lie, when you slander and commit perjury? When the whole of your mind and your efforts are on material things? When you take no care of your soul, don’t even go to confession, take communion, don’t pray or study improving or religious literature? Put all that sort of thing out of your mind. It’s impossible for your children to become good people unless you, as parents, set them a good example. And if it ever happens that you get ...
Shortly before He was taken away to be put to death, Christ turned to His heavenly Father and addressed Him in fervent prayer. The prayer is so important for the spiritual formation of the Church that it’s known in Greek as the “Archiepiscopal Prayer”. In it, Jesus prays for the disciples He’s leaving and, at the same time, reveals the Person of the Divine Father and His relationship with the Son. Today, the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the 1st Ecumenical Synod in Nicea, we shall recall this prayer in the Gospel reading (Jn. 17, 1-13) If we look carefully at the content of this prayer, we can see immediately the concern of Christ, the Chief Shepherd, for his flock. ...
It was a pleasure to see how Elders Paisios and Elder Porfyrios thought about each other. One of the monks said to Elder Paisios: ‘I’d like to talk to you about something I’ve discussed with Elder Porfyrios’. ‘If you’ve talked to Elder Porfyrios, you don’t need to talk to me as well, because he’s a coloured satellite television and I’m only a black and white set’. That was the humble view of the Elder. On the other hand, Elder Porfyrios told us: ‘The Grace that Elder Paisios has is worth more than mine, because he’s acquired it through great efforts and ascetic sweat, whereas God gave me mine completely for free, when I was still very young, simply so that I could be of help ...
Those who belong to the Church of Christ belong to the truth, and those who don’t belong to the truth don’t belong to the Church of Christ. People who are very tall and those who are very short are both just as far away from the stars.
The faithful who cheerfully shoulder their Cross are the basis of a well-regulated state, one which builds its progress on Christian morality, selfless love, active hope, harmony and mutual understanding. Cross-bearing Christians are the bulwark against the moral and economic crisis in our society. The moral decline of people who don’t shoulder their cross gladly and patiently has brought about today’s economic crisis, which, nevertheless, is ‘the disciplinarian to bring us to Christ’ (Gal. 3, 24), because it brings us close to Him, because it forces us to rein in our excessive demands and to increase our trust in Him. The economic crisis teaches us to abandon extroversion and to concentrate on full knowledge of our self, this unknown quantity ...
c. The word of God, the Mysteries and sacramentalism. The correct understanding of “mystery” was always the touchstone of Christian teaching and life – not only in the early Christian community, when the Church contended with an assortment of mystery cults, but also much later, when an exclusively scholastic theology developed (in both the West, and the East) a sacramentalistic view of the Christian mysteries. It is worth remembering that the crux of that theological conflict during the Reformation was a sacramentalistic view of the Holy Eucharist, which tragically ended in the complete departure of Protestant theology from the original mysteriology of the undivided Church. The dialectical antithesis between “sacramentalism” (which dominated pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic theology, but also some ...
Both eastern and western Christians, on first hearing of Western Orthodoxy, often ask such questions as “Who are these people?” or “Why haven’t I heard of them before?” Source: /www.allsaints-stl.org/ First, who are Western Orthodox Christians? Simply, they are those Christians of the West who have discovered the truth of Orthodoxy and who have embraced the Orthodox faith and now worship and practice their Orthodox faith according to the venerable and ancient traditions of the West – traditions whose roots go back to that time when the Western Church was still fully Orthodox. Many westerners who have embraced Orthodoxy have known it only in its eastern forms, primarily because these have been the predominantly visible forms of Orthodoxy in the West. Particularly ...
The April 2 edition of Newsweek Magazine featured a piece (just in time for Western Easter) by journalist Andrew Sullivan. It is a heartfelt piece, urging its readers to ignore (i.e. reject) all forms of contemporary Christianity and to embrace Jesus instead. Reading this thoughtful essay, I could not shake the feeling that Mr. Sullivan was intending his piece to be edgy and radical. But for those whose reading is not confined to Newsweek Magazine, it was painfully apparent that Mr. Sullivan was in fact re-issuing The Same Old Thing. Far from being new and radical in his proposal, he was trudging down a well-trodden road in the wake of many people before him. The road even has a name, ...
Avoid unsavoury company and your soul will always be very peaceful.
The problem of power and the innate tendency towards its arbitrary use has exercised the human mind since at least the time that political philosophy has existed as a discipline. ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’*. Princes and governments are by far the most dangerous elements in any society. Excessive power is inherently dangerous and produces negative results. It leads to grossly mistaken judgments and decisions, disregard of danger, egocentricity and a lack of compassion towards others. Domination and force are two necessary components of the exercise of power. In the end, power can make its appearance in all human relations and the critical mind should examine the ways in which it is exercised and the repercussions ...
Therefore, the prophets were advocating repentance and a return to the Lord’s path. When all is said and done, everything is futile; both our well being and our wealth, even the accomplishment of our country’s liberation (translator’s note: from Turkish occupation) is a secular event. The Lord wishes people firstly to be liberated in themselves and then to live in a liberated country. He wishes to see us being free from sin, passions, apostasy and the darkness which descends on us when He is absent from our lives. Only then will truly liberated people manage to acquire a liberated country. If your country is free, yet you are slave to sin and your passions, then you will cause your country’s ...
The Firefly ship Serenity For a preacher who loves to mine contemporary culture (that ephemeral thing) for theological nuggets, the late TV series “Firefly” represents a rare gift. Each of the all-too-brief fifteen episodes and the movie “Serenity” based upon it offer a number of lines in which the perceptive theologian can find Christian truth. (You just need to have your ears wide open, and your brown coat on.) Here I would like to recall two of them, both of them much needed Firefly insights for believers who strive to remain faithful to Jesus Christ in the midst of an increasingly secular world. The first comes from a conversation (make that “interrogation”), in which Malcolm Reynolds, the captain of ...
Give your heart to the Lord and He’ll provide you with all the vitamins and energy you need to prevent you from collapsing.
Arius was influenced by Jewish monotheism and the philosophical concept of transcendence and by the absolute property of God, the cosmological dyalistic perceptions and especially by the teaching of Philo about the «created» Logos, through whom God created the world Generally, using Greek terms, Arianism denied that the Son is of one essence, nature, or substance with God; He is not consubstantial -homoousios- with the Father, and therefore not like Him, or equal in dignity, or co-eternal, or within the real sphere of Deity. The Logos which St. John exalts is an attribute, Reason, belonging to the Divine nature, not a person distinct from another, and therefore is a Son merely in figure of speech. These consequences follow upon the ...
Books by people who see religion as a profound misunderstanding or dangerous delusion have proliferated recently. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has been on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith sold well, prompting the author to write a sequel of sorts, Letter to a Christian Nation. Most of these attacks on religion have a common focus: religion is generally lumped with fundamentalism (nonfundamentalist believers are seen as timid, not really willing to go where their more benighted brethren do); and, like fundamentalists, the attackers seem to know exactly what they mean by God. An equally fundamentalist belief in scientism replaces religious belief, insisting that there is only one kind of knowledge that ...
