St. Mary's Orthodox Bookstore

More From Mar Cassian's Ministry

2011-05-23T17:54:00.000-04:00

Book of Common Prayer of the Syrian church

2010-06-14T09:41:00.002-04:00

In The Book of Common Prayer of the Syrian Church, Bede Griffiths, a monk of the Kurisumala Ashram in Kerala, India, presents a rich tradition of biblically based theology articulated through "a wealth of poetic beauty which has never been equaled." Providing an English translation of the daily prayers based on the West Syrian liturgy and approved for use in the Syrian Orthodox and the Catholic Syro-Malankara Churches of South India, Griffiths carefully attends to the rich complexity of the Syriac liturgical tradition. The result is unparalleled access to a distinctively Asian tradition of Christian prayer and theology, prayer and practice, suffused with awe and wonder before the divine mysteries. Originally printed in India, and available only in very limited circulation, Gorgias Press is pleased to introduce Western and worldwide audiences to this rare treasure of the Christian East, presenting Bede Griffiths' The Book of Common Prayer of the Syrian Church to a wide English-language readership of students, scholars, clergy, and laity.

Christ is Calling You! A course in catacomb pastorship

2010-06-07T23:03:00.000-04:00

"The time has come, young man, for you to hear a voice which has been calling you..."

With these words, Fr. George Calciu began a series of seven weekly homilies to the youth of communist Romania in 1978. Hundreds of young people risked their lives to hear him, climbing over the walls when the authorities tried to keep them away.

Fr. George knew this would mean his imprisonment and probable death, but he was prepared. Already he had endured sixteen years in the anti-human communist prison system. He was a survivor of the scientific experiment of Pitesti: the most diabolical system of torture ever devised, which attempted to methodically dismantle the human personality. Having had the very foundation of his soul defiled, Fr. George found the inward strength to turn to Christ, from Whom he received not only restoration and healing, but even the superhuman power to love and forgive his torturers. On his release from prison, he gave his homilies out of his desire to! lay down his life for Christ and for young people lost in materialism. Purified in a crucible of suffering, his fiery soul cried out to them, awakening them to the purpose of existence and changing their lives forever. He was again incarcerated in 1979, and after his release in 1984 he was exiled to America. When he returned to Romania in 1989, ten thousand young people came to pray with him, despite concerted efforts by the authorities to stop this event.

Fr. Calciu's sermons and a recent interview are presented here, offering a glimpse into the heart and soul of a genuine pastor and a living confessor of Christ. His sermons render an urgency and set the tone for contemporary Christian pastors under impossible conditions, when no human logic can prevail, but only direct dependence on God.

What do we mean by the word Orthodox?

2010-04-25T21:09:00.000-04:00

By St John Maximovitch

Shortly after the doctrine of Christ began to be propagated among the Gentiles, the followers of Christ in Antioch began to be called Christians (Acts XI:26). The word “Christian” indicated that those who bore this name belonged to Christ-belonged in the sense of devotion to Christ and his Doctrine. From Antioch the name of Christian was spread everywhere.

The followers of Christ gladly called themselves by the name of their beloved Teacher and Lord; and the enemies of Christ called His followers Christians by carrying over to them the ill-will and hatred which they breathed against Christ.

However, quite soon there appeared people who, while calling themselves Christians, were not of Christ in spirit. Of them Christ had spoken earlier:

Not everyone that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven (St. Matt. VII:5).

Christ prophesied also that many would pass themselves off for Christ Himself: Many shall come in my name, sayings I am Christ (Matt. XXIV:5). The Apostles in their epistles indicated that false bearers of the name of Christ had appeared already in their time:

As ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists (I John II:19).

They indicated that those who stepped away from the doctrine of Christ should not be considered their own:

They went out from us but were not of us (I John II:19)

Warning against quarrels and disagreements in minor matters (I Cor. I:10-14), at the same time the Apostles strictly commanded their disciples to shun those who do not bring the true doctrine (II John I:10). The Lord, through the Revelation given to the Apostle John the Theologian, sternly accused those who, calling themselves faithful, did not act in accordance with their name; for in such a case it would be false for them.

Of what use was it of old to call oneself a Jew, an Old Testament follower of the true faith, if one was not such in actuality? Such the Holy Scripture calls the synagogue of Satan (Apocalypse II:9).

In the same way a Christian in the strict sense is he only who confesses the true doctrine of Christ and lives in accordance with it. The designation of a Christian consists in glorifying the Heavenly Father by one’s life.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven (St. Matt. V:16).

But true glorification of God is possible only if one rightly believes and expresses his right belief in words and deeds.

Therefore true Christianity and it alone may be named “right-glorifying” (Ortho-doxy). By the word “Orthodoxy” we confess our firm conviction that it is precisely our Faith that is the true doctrine of Christ. When we call anyone or anything Orthodox, we by this very fact indicate his or its non-counterfeit and uncorrupted Christianity, rejecting at the same time that which falsely appropriates the name of Christ.

© 2010, Preachers Institute. All rights reserved. On republishing this, please provide a link to the original post.

Read more: What do we mean by the word ORTHODOX | Preachers Institute

source: http://preachersinstitute.com/2010/04/what-do-we-mean-by-the-word-orthodox/

Introducing the Orthodox Churches

2010-03-31T12:48:00.001-04:00

by Paulos Mar Gregorios

For more by him: http://www.amazon.com/Paulos-Gregorios/e/B001ICIZ4M/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

Sharing God and a sharing world

2010-03-31T12:43:00.000-04:00

Another must read from Geevarghese Mar Osthathios

A Beginner's Guide to Prayer: The Orthodox Way to Draw Closer to God

2010-03-31T12:39:00.000-04:00

"Fr. Patrick Reardon gives us desperately needed reflections on the saints in a style and substance fit for contemporary people." -- Fr. Thomas Hopko -

This is a book for those of us who are struggling to establish an effective prayer life. Written neither for monastics or scholars, A Beginner’s Guide to Prayer speaks to the average man or woman on the street who desires a deeper relationship with God but is unsure how or where to begin. Drawing from nearly 2000 years of Orthodox spiritual wisdom, the author offers warm, practical, pastoral advice whose genius is to be found in its homespun simplicity and straightforward style.

The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God

2010-03-31T12:37:00.000-04:00

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

This jewel of Eastern Christianity aims at enabling a person to be in God’s presence, rather than to focus on feelings or thoughts about God.

The first section of The Jesus Prayer offers a concise overview of the history, theology, and spirituality of Orthodoxy, so that the Prayer can be understood in its native context. Following, is a conversational question-and-answer format that takes the reader through practical steps for adopting this profound practice in everyday life.

Have you seen the one I Love?

2010-01-26T14:52:00.000-05:00

Pope Shenouda draws upon his many years of contemplation as a monk in the ancient desert of Scetis, Egypt to develop his commentary on the human soul. A true Alexandrian father, descendent from Sts. Athanasius, Clement and Cyril, His Holiness employs the Song of Songs to provide the blueprint of our quest for love and hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

The book is a translation and transcription of a lecture series given by Pope Shenouda in the 1970s. As a lecture series, it draws one in as if His Holiness were conversing directly with the reader. The imagery that prevails invokes the mind to travel to Egypt to visit with this desert monk. He encourages the reader to share in his prayers, asks the reader questions, and invites us to join him on his journey of discovering the soul. The main focus of the book is to meditate on the human soul while she searches for her Beloved. It is only with an understanding of our spirituality that we may embark on our voyage leading to our Lord.

Theology of a classless society

2009-12-27T15:22:00.001-05:00

by Geevarghese Mar Osthathios

An Orthodox look at the spiritual, social and political consequences of the doctrine of the Trinity, arguing that the idea of a classless society is central to Christianity.

Faith Adoring the Mystery: Reading the Bible With St. Ephraem the Syrian

2009-12-27T15:19:00.000-05:00

This is a very useful lecture by an important student of the works of Ephraem the Syrian. Professor Griffith offers a brief overview of the life of Ephraem and then focuses on his treatment of Scripture. Anyone interested in Syriac Christianity or the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible should have this small volume on his shelf.

St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns On Paradise

2009-12-26T15:18:00.000-05:00

St Ephrem the Syrian's cycle of 15 Hymns on Paradise offers a fine example of Christian poetry, in which the author weaves a profound theological synthesis around a particular Biblical narrative. Centered on Genesis 2 and 3, he expresses his awareness of the sacramental character of the created world, and of the potential of everything in the created world to act as a witness and pointer to the creator. God's two witnesses, says Ephrem, are: 'Nature, through man's use of it, [and] Scripture, through his reading it." In his writing, Ephrem posits an inherent link between the material and spiritual worlds. St Ephrem's mode of theological discussion is essentially Biblical and Semitic in character. He uses types and symbols to express connections or relationships to 'reveal' something that is otherwise 'hidden,' particularly expressing meanings between the Old Testament and the New, between this world and the heavenly, between the New Testament and the sacraments, and between the sacraments and the eschaton. Because his theology is not tied to a particular cultural or philosophical background, but operates by means of imagery and symbolism basic to all human experience, his theological vision expressed in his hymns has a freshness and immediacy today that few other theological works from the early Christian period can hope to achieve. the Holy Mountain. Hymns on Paradise is part of the POPULAR PATRISTIC SERIES.

Ephrem the Syrian: Select Poems

2009-12-26T15:16:00.000-05:00

Ephrem the Syrian is the most important poet and theologian of the Syriac Christian tradition. His numerous hymns, homilies, and commentaries were highly influential for later generations, and his poetry continues to be broadly used in the liturgies of Syrian Christian churches. This new translation of twenty poems, the only edition of Ephrem that features a text in vocalized serto script with a facing translation, offers a broad and varied introduction to Ephrem's work. Arranged according to his concept of salvation history, this book will allow readers to further explore his poetry in both its original language and in a contemporary English translation.

The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem

2009-12-24T15:14:00.000-05:00

Sebastian Brock is Reader in Syriac Studies in the University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow of Wolfson College. He has written extensively on Syriac subjects and served on the translation panel which produced The Psalms: A New Translation for Worship (1977). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Sobornost/Eastern Churches Review, and is curator of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts at the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham. Before taking up his present position, Dr. Brock taught in the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham and in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Holy Women of the Syrian Orient

2009-12-23T15:13:00.000-05:00

"An opportunity to explore the complex social history of an important and very much neglected part of the late antique world: the Syrian Orient, one of the major cultural systems contributing both to the Eastern and Western religious heritage." -- Gail Paterson Corrington, Classical World

The fifteen hagiographies about holy women of the Syrian Orient collected here include stories of martyrs' passions and saints' lives, pious romances and personal reminiscences. Dating from the fourth to seventh centuries A.D., they are translated from Syriac into accessible and vivid prose. Annotations and source notes by the translators help clarify elements that may be unfamiliar to some readers. This collection bears witness to the profound contributions women made to early Chistianity: their various roles, their leadership inside and outside the church structure, and their power to influence others. A new preface discusses recent developments in the field and updates the bibliography.

America's Prophet

2009-12-22T13:13:00.002-05:00

A bestselling author for his popular explorations of the lands of the Bible, Feiler turns his attention to the biblical figure of Moses in U.S. history. He argues that the story of the life of Moses as told in the book of Exodus has been the dominant metanarrative employed by political and social leaders in shaping America's identity, from the Pilgrims escaping religious persecution to the civil rights movement with its vision of a Promised Land. A journalist rather than a historian, Feiler approaches his subject using the same formula he has employed in previous books: physical walks through historic sites and interviews with experts. Although the book offers snippets of interesting anecdotes, the approach is uncontroversial and the book lacks forward momentum. Feiler is a popularizer, and readers interested in a light and cursory treatment of a theme in U.S. history will enjoy it.

According to one reviewer:

America's Prophet is a very interesting book about the figure of Moses in the history of America. When I first got this book, I was a bit confused because I didn't think Moses had much of a place in American history. I can't believe how wrong I was - again and again, Moses comes up as a figure of inspiration, someone to lead us through troubled times to a Promised Land. Americans see themselves in the story of Moses, even now. It's really incredible to read about.

A favorite part of America's Prophet was when Feiler retraced part of the Underground Railroad. He went out in the middle of the night and literally darted between alleyways and buildings, trying to get a sense of what it was like. Of course, he only followed a very short part of the Railroad, but I was so impressed by his need to become part of the story.

If you are interested in the Bible you must pick up Bruce Feiler's books. Though he is Jewish, his words about faith and spirituality cross all religious boundaries. His travels to find and connect with actual places in the Bible are wonderful to read about, and his discussion of history is simply fascinating. Even if you don't normally like non-fiction, you should try Bruce Feiler's books. He really is a not-to-be-missed author, and America's Prophet is no exception. I enjoyed it very much and already can't wait for his next book to be released!

You can listen to an interview of the books author at the following: http://wamu.org/audio/dr/09/12/r2091222-29258.asx

Wade in the River - Early African Christian Faith

2009-12-10T13:58:00.000-05:00

Following Extract from the book Wade In The River by Fr. Paisius Altschul.

Pentecost: Revealing the Church to the Nations

Forty days after Christ rose from the dead, He ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives. (Acts 1:1-11) Ten days later, on Pentecost, His followers were supernaturally empowered to become martyr/witnesses for the Messiah (Acts 1:8; 2:1-4). There were twelve major Apostles (Luke 6:12-16), seventy lesser Apostles (Luke 10:1), and many other witnesses of His resurrection, both men and women (1 Cor. 15:5-6). This spiritual flood of the Holy Spirit revealed the international spectrum of the Church. People from all parts of the known world responded on Pentecost to the message of Christ and His Salvation. The Church is the spiritual Ark that offered salvation for the children of Noah from the pollution of the world. The Church is called Orthodox, for Orthodox means true or authentic worship of God (John 4:23; Phil. 3:3).

After Pentecost, the Apostles began to spread throughout the earth. John went to Asia Minor, present-day Turkey. Thomas went to India, Matthew to Ethiopia, ad Mark returned to Egypt. Peter and Paul went to Greece and Rome, and Andrew to Greece and Russia. They covered the known world with the knowledge of the Lord (Heb. 2:14), as in Noah’s day the waters covered the earth. But this flood was for the destruction of darkness and sin and the bringing in of everlasting righteousness, peace and joy for all. The way into this Ark was through repentance, a radical change from a self-centered life to a Christ-centered life. The entrance to this Promised land was through a watery tomb called Baptism, like the tomb that Abraham acquired from the Hittites to begin his life in the promised Land. Here one dies to the old life and is born again into the new life of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Divine energy from God, called grace, permeates the soul and life of the newly baptized person, making him a child of God, restoring him to a relationship with the same Creator that had formed the Gihon River and guided Noah and the early God-seekers (Acts 2:38; 1 Pet. 3:18-22). He comes into a living communion with all that have ever believed and trusted in God from the creation of the world to the present age (Heb. 12:1, 22-24). He begins to live according to the teachings of the Son of God, the living Word, who came down from heaven to enlighten the children of Noah with His guidance. Love from God, love for God, love for neighbor, love for enemies, and love for creation fills the newborn soul.

Early Church Growth and Opposition

Thus, the Apostles went forth with Christ’s teachings and established communities in hamlets, villages, and cities throughout the known world. Upon their departure, they left bishops as shepherds to care for the flock of God. These were charged by the Holy Spirit to continue in the same way and guide the others who would come after them. As the churches grew, the bishops (overseers) ordained priests (elders) and deacons (helpers) to represent them. But opposition soon arose against this flood of light and truth flowing over the earth. Those clinging to the old power-structures of greed, violence, power, sensuality, demonic sorcery and idolatry began almost immediately to kill and imprison Christians, attempting to break the restored link with God. Yet a strange thing ocurred. The more Christians that were killed, the more their numbers grew. (Acts 8:1,4-8) It became apparent that by linking oneself to Jesus and His Church, one was being linked to immortality itself. Those who were martyred revealed a Kingdom that could not be shaken even by death. They were still alive, only now without the weight and burden of their fleshly concerns and desires. Occasionally they would be seen in the other realm, thereby revealing continuity of life and awareness, and an unshakable and abiding peace.

The Earliest African Christians

It was with this flood of spiritual power that the knowledge of Jesus Christ was brought into Africa. After the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, many heard of this mighty change. In Jerusalem, three thousand people were baptized in one day. (Acts 2:41) They were assembled from all over the Diaspora, including Egypt, Libya, and Cyrene in North Africa. (Acts 2:10) When they returned home they shared their new Faith and teaching. Furthermore, a powerful African teacher, Apollos of Alexandria, received this Faith through the traveling-companions of the Apostles Paul, Priscilla and Aquilla, and he continued to spread it through his life and teaching. (Acts 18:24-28)

The Ethiopian Eunuch

The Holy Scripture record the encounter of the Apostles Philip with an Ethiopian Jew, the finance minister of Queen Kandake, who was returning to his country after his annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem. (The term “Kandake” was Nubian. It referred to either the queen mother or a queen ruling in her own right, as several had done since the second century B.C.)

This was the golden age for Meroe of ancient Nubia, a kingdom which competed with both Egypt and Axum for power, land, and wealth in the ancient world. Meroitic power then extended from Sennar in the south, below Axum, as far North as Maharaqqa, in present-day southern Egypt. At this time, the Meroitic Kingdom surpassed Axum in influence. Weaker kingdoms often served stronger ones in a suzerainty-type of agreement, i.e. they would provide revenue and manpower in return for protection by the stronger kingdom. They traded in ebony, gold, ivory, and frankincense.) This royal treasure had stopped for a rest near Gaza, and was chanting and meditating on the prophecies of Isaiah. (Chanting the Scriptures out loud was the normal mode of reading in those days, as it has continued to be in the Orthodox Church since that time.) St, Philip approached him and explained the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Jesus the Messiah. The Ethiopian dignitary believed and was baptized, and returned to Africa with the good news of forgiveness and restoration with God. (Acts 8:26-39)

Lucius and Simeon in Antioch: Africans in Early Church Leadership

One of the qualities of the early Church was its multi-cultural unity. Whereas at the tower of Babel, peoples’ tongues were were confused and the human race was divided into ethnic groups, in Jerusalem, on Pentecost, tongues of spiritual fire were poured out on the one hundred twenty disciples, bringing them to a supernatural oneness of the soul that transcended ethnic groups and cultures. Three thousand people from all over the world, including Africa, were immediately brought into this heavenly community. This trans-ethnic unity existed wherever Christianity was established. In Syrian Antioch, for instance, as recorded in Acts 13, the leaders of the church were the future apostles Paul and Barnabas (both Jewish), Simeon, called Niger (i.e. black, after his ethnic background), Lucius of Cyrene, in present-day Libya, and Manaen, who had grown up with Herod the Tetrarch. These five were ministering (Gr. liturgizing) to the Lord with prayer and fasting, when the Holy Spirit spoke to them, commanding them to set aside Paul and Barnabas for apostolic work. The other three then laid hands on them and after prayer sent them out. Thus, African prophets in Antioch shared responsibility for the future missionary labors of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas.

Africa and the Early Church

Early Egptian Christianity: The Apostle and Evangelist Mark

The wife of the Apostle Peter was the cousin of Aristobulus, a disciple of Christ. Aristobulus’ wife, Mary, is mentioned in Acts 12:12 as the matron of the home where the early Christians gathered for prayer. This is the traditional site of the Last Supper and of the “upper room” of Pentecost, and the place where the Christians met to pray for the Apostle Peter when he was in prison. Aristobulus and Mary were the parents of John Mark, also called Mark, one of the seventy Apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ (Luke 10:1-24).

He was born in Cyrene, one of the cities of the Pentapolis in Libya, where he and his parents were notable members of the Jewish community. According to Egyptian Christian tradition, this is the Mark who not only accompanied the holy Apostles Paul and Barnabas (Acts 12:25), but later also went with the holy Apostle Peter to Rome. From what he learned from the Apostle Peter, he wrote the Gospel according to St. Mark. To avoid persecution in Rome, and at the Lord’s direction, both Peter and Mark went to Egypt. After traveling to Alexandria, they went to Babylon (not the one in present-day Iraq), where the Apostle Peter wrote his first epistle. (1 Pet. 5:13) Remnants of this city, which was named by Jews who settled there from old Babylon after the land of their previous captivity, can still be seen today in Old Cairo. St. Peter left his younger companion there and returned to Rome, where he was later martyred. St. Mark established two churches in the Pentapolis of Libya between A.D. 56 and 60, and in A.D. 61 he returned to Alexandria. Upon entering the city, his first order of bussiness was to have his sandal repaired, which had torn during his long journy. He brought it to a cobbler named Anianus. As Anianus was repairing the leather, his awl slipped and pierced his hand, and he cried out in Greek, “Eis Theos!” which means “One God!” When St. Mark heard this cry, he rejoiced and took advantage of the opportunity to speak to him about the One God, Jesus the Messiah. He took clay and spittle and applied it to Anianus’ hand, praying in the Name of Jesus Christ, and the wound was immediately healed.

After this miracle, the heart of Anianus was opened and St.Mark told him the story of the Faith. He told him about the creation, about the fall of Adam and Eve, about Noah and the Flood, about how God sent Moses to deliver Israel and give them the Law, about the captivity in Babylon, and the prophecies concerning the Messiah. After he heard the entire story, Anianus brought St. Mark to his house, where, after hearing the Good News of salvation, he and his family were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. As the followers of Christ spread and multiplied in Alexandria, the hostility of the pagan community was stirred up. They abducted St. Mark and, on a pagan feast day in A.D. 68, dragged him through the streets until he gave holy soul into the hands of God. Prior to his martydom, St. Mark ordained Anianus bishop over Alexandria, along with three priests and seven deacons. Thus the growing movement of the Faith in Africa was linked with the Apostles of Christ, through the hands of the Apostle and Evangelist Mark.

Egyptian Preparation for the Gospel

The people of Egypt were by nature deeply religious. Not only had the Hebrew Prophet Jeremiah spoken to them of the Virgin and child, but the ancient Pharaonic religion also contained foreshadowings of the Gospel. The symbol of the Ankh, which signified life, was later understood to prefigure the Cross, the Tree of Life. The national devotion to the goddess Isis and her son Horus was a preparation for the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy-a Virgin carrying a child into the temples and causing the gods to fall down. The Egyptians already believed in the concept of the death and resurrection of god, of future judgement and immortality. When the message of the Gospel was confirmed by corresponding miracles, the prepared soil of their heart was able to receive the seed of Christ, allow it to take root, and quickly bring forth spiritual fruit.

Early Ascetics Near Alexandria

In the early years of the Christian Faith in Africa, a life of virginity and monastic-like worship began to emerge, first among the Jewish converts a later among the native Egyptians, the Copts. Their way of life was described by Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of early Egyptian Christianity who reposed in A.D. 50, in his book the Contemplative life. The early Church historians Eusebius, and the Western Christian father, Jerome, note that he was referring to Christians. They were called theraputae, or healers, and also “ascetics” in the Church rituals and liturgy. They sought to apply the teachings of Christ on prayer, fasting and simple living in a practical way. They lived in communities away from the city, ate bread and herbs and drank water after sunset, had structured prayer at dawn and sunset, studied the Holy Scriptures and writings of the fathers throughout the day, and met together for all-night vigil on Saturdays. Throughout the week they lived in solitude, yet they were close enough for contact if need arose. The largest community of these early ascetics was on Lake Maryut near Alexandria.

The Prayer Life Of The Early African Christians

The Life of the African converts under St. Mark was examplary. He taught them the seven set times of prayer known as the Hours or Agbeya. The Prophet-King David had referred to these times of prayer when he said, Seven times a day I praise You because of Your righteous judgements (Ps. 118:164 {LXX}, 119:164 {KJV}. Again in verse 62, he declared, At midnight I will rise to give thanks to you.

This divided the day into eight watches of three hours each, and became the modal of constant prayer throughout the early Christian world St. John of Constant prayer throughout the early Christian world. St. John Cassian of Gaul, who traveled to Egypt in the 4th century, recorded that the cycle of prayer in the Church of Alexandria was established before the beginning of monasticism, and that “these arrangement were observed by all the servants of God in Egypt.” When some clergy found fault with St. Basil, archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, for his proposed night-vigils, he replied that this was already the practice in Egypt, again showing that it existed before the beginning of organized monasticism.

The level of spirituality among the laity was so high that the Lord showed two of the greatest monastic saints examples of lay people who excelled them in Sanctity. St. Anthony was shown a physician who shared his wealth with the poor and sang “Holy, Holy, Holy” throughout the day. St. Macarius was led to two sisters who lived with their husbands under the same roof, yet never quarreled with each other, nor said a malicious or worldly word, during the fifteen years they lived together. An angel revealed that their sanctity surpassed even that achieved by St. Macarius the Great in his many years of prayer and fasting in the desert.

The African Martyrs

Martyrs for Christ have a very large place in the African Church. Ever since Simon of Cyrene helped carry Jesus’ Cross (Luke 23:26), African Christians have been at the forefront of the Cross-bearing path of Christ. Jesus Himself told His disciples, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it (Luke 9:23-24).

This willingness to take up the Cross and follow Jesus, to lose one’s life for Christ and find it in Him forever, has been recounted again and again in the history of Faith in Africa. Outside of local pagan resistance to the Faith when it was first established in Egypt, Nubia, and parts of Ethiopia, where St. Mark, St. Simon the Canaanite, and St. Matthew were martyred respectively, the Church in Africa enjoyed relative peace for the first two hundred years. But in A.D. 203, the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus issued an edict outlawing Christianity and Judaism. As a result, the famous Catechetical School in Alexandria was closed, and Christians were tortured, persecuted, and martyred. Incredible and horrific persecutions also occurred under the Emperors Decius (A.D. 249-251), Gaius (251-253), and Valerian (253-260), until the next emperor, Gallienus (260-268), issued the Edict of Tolerance, which brought a temporary end to the persecutions and enabled churches to be built. However, in 284 the most severe and bloody of all the persecuations against the Church began when Diocletian ascended the imperial throne. During his iinfamous reign of terror an estimated million African martrs left this world for the Kingdom of Christ. The Church in Egypt dates the beginning og her calender year from A.D. 284, and labels it A.M. (i.e., Anno Martyrium, the Year of the Martyrs). In A.D. 305, Diocletian abdicated his throne and was succeeded by Galerius (305-311) and Maximinus Daia (311-313).

Although the African Church had a brief respite, before long these two emperors issued a new Edict of Persecution. It was not until the Emperor Constantine ascended the throne and issued his Edict of Toleration in A.D. 313 that the persecution against the Church by the Pagan Roman emperors stopped. The last African martyr during this period was the 17nth Patriarch of Alexandria, St. Peter, called the “Seal of the Martyrs.” [1]

Father Seraphim Rose

2009-10-30T14:19:00.000-04:00

This epic biography of Hieromonk Seraphim Rose tells the unique story of a man who, having grown up in a typical American home in southern California, became one of the greatest teachers of Orthodox Christianity in our times, loved and revered throughout Russia and Eastern Europe.

Quoting at length from his letters, journals, manuscripts, recorded lectures and published writings, this book traces Fr. Seraphim’s intense search for truth and his philosophical development, setting forth his message and offering a glimpse into the soul of a man who lived, even while on this earth, in the otherworldly Kingdom of God.

A greatly revised version of Not of This World, this new Life of Fr. Seraphim incorporates years of new research and includes much additional material. Because it deals closely with events in the recent history of Orthodoxy in America, the book has been reviewed prior to publication by clergy, monastics and laypeople from most of the Orthodox jurisdictions represented in this country.

Nihilism

2009-10-29T14:17:00.000-04:00

In 1962, the young Eugene Rose undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of Truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of material he compiled for this work, only the present essay has come down to us in completed form. Here Eugene reveals the core of all modern thought and life--the belief that all truth is relative--and shows how this belief has been translated into action in our century. Today, three decades after he wrote it, this essay is surely timelier than ever. It clearly explains why contemporary ideas, values, and attitudes--the "spirit of the age"--are shifting so rapidly in the direction of moral anarchy, as the philosophy of Nihilism enters more deeply into the fiber of society. Nietszche was right when he predicted that the 20th century would usher in "the triumph of Nihilism."

Indeed, the Christian is--in an ultimate sense--a "Nihilist"; to him, in the end, the world is nothing, and God is all. On the one hand, the true Nihilist places his faith in things that pass away and end in nothing. On the other hand, the Christian, renouncing such vanity, places his faith in the one thing that will not pass away, the Kingdom of God.

God's Revelation to the Human Heart

2009-10-28T14:15:00.000-04:00

What does man seek in religion and what should he seek in it? How does God reveal Himself in order to bring man to a knowledge of the Truth? How does suffering help this revelation to occur? Fr. Seraphim Rose addressed these and other issues during a lecture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1981. GOD'S REVELATION TO THE HUMAN HEART is a transcription of that lecture, and the question-and-answer session between Fr. Seraphim and the university students.

Drawing upon a wealth of resources--the Holy Scriptures, patristic writings, the Lives of ancient and modern saints, and accounts of persecuted Christians in today's world--Fr. Seraphim leads the audience to the core of all Christian life: the conversion of the heart of man, which begins to burn with love for Christ and transforms him into a new man.

2009-10-26T10:20:00.000-04:00

SYRIAC LEXICON

Long awaited new Syriac-English dictionary by Michael Sokoloff now available for purchase

The second edition of Carl Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum, published in 1928, is rightly considered to be the best dictionary of Syriac ever written. However, its Latin language and the ordering of words according to triliteral Semitic roots make its use difficult for most students and scholars. Moreover, the dictionary was composed in an extremely concise manner, which meant that references were given without citing any of the text. This often makes the glosses impossible even for someone who knows Latin.

In the 81 years that have passed since the book's publication, there have been great advances in both Aramaic and Semitic studies. Moreover, Syriac studies—especially the publication of the critical texts of classical authors, such as Ephrem—have greatly enhanced our knowledge of Syriac and have made the publication of a new and up-to-date dictionary imperative. However, because a new dictionary project does not yet exist and would take decades to complete, this edition of Brockelmann's work has been undertaken to make Syriac vocabulary more accessible to scholars, students, and Syriac speakers. Following are the changes introduced into the Syriac Lexicon in this revision:

The meanings are given in English, not Latin
The vocabulary is ordered alphabetically.
All text citations have been verified by consulting the original publications, and where new critical editions have appeared (e.g., those of E. Beck for the works of Ephrem), references have been changed to point to the new editions.
Text citations with partial or complete translations have now been provided.
All of the etymologies have been thoroughly revised.
Two electronic indexes (English-Syriac and Text References) have been prepared.
This dictionary is an essential tool for anyone working in Syriac studies, Semitic linguistics, and biblical studies.

Title:	A Syriac Lexicon
Subtitle:	A Translation from the Latin, Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum
Availability:	In Press
Publisher:	Gorgias Press & Eisenbrauns

	By Michael Sokoloff
ISBN:	978-1-60724-620-6
Availability:	In_Press
Language:	English and Syriac
Format:	Hardback, Black, 7 x 10 in
Pages:	1738

Resolving apparent inconsistencies in Scripture

2009-10-18T13:35:00.001-04:00

A YouTube series purports to point out contradictions in Scriptural statements. In this video Archbishop LAZAR replies.

The Way of the Pilgrim

2009-10-10T10:53:00.000-04:00

This classic work of Russian spirituality tells of an anonymous peasant's quest for the secret of prayer. The Pilgrim searches high and low to know what St. Paul meant when he said that Christians should pray always. Each new stop becomes a home for a moment for this happy wanderer who has only a knapsack and a few crusts of bread, but who finds goodness and plenty wherever he goes.

Embraced by Lucifer

2009-10-09T10:22:00.001-04:00

It is disturbing to realize how many Christians -- even Orthodox Christians -- are reading the stacks of books about prayer, angels, miracles, and such being sold today which have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. Instead these books are filled with pagan, gnostic, and demonic teaching which could lead a person away from Christ and towards the powers of darkness. The popularity of these books shows that decades of dry materialism have produced a widespread hunger for spirituality, but also that many Christians don’t understand the dangers of indiscriminate spiritual experience. Just because a book speaks of spirits or angels or prayer or meditation or even of Jesus Christ does not mean it is Christian. St. John says, ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.’ (1 John 4:1).

Just because someone prophesies future events or has supernatural knowledge does not mean this knowledge comes from the Lord. The following story is told of St. Anthony, the great third-century Egyptian monk: ‘Some brothers came to find Abba Anthony to tell him about the visions they were having, and to find out if they were true or if they came from the demons. They had a donkey which died on the way. When they reached the old man, he said to them before they could ask him anything, “How was it that the little donkey died on the way here?” They said, “How do you know about that, Father?” And he told them, “The demons showed me.” Thus the old man convinced them that their visions came from the demons.’

There are guidelines for discerning sound Christian books from others. My first recommendation is to read the Bible and the Orthodox fathers and the lives of the saints, books that generations of Christians have read and found to be reliable. But since dubious spiritual books are everywhere, and perhaps our neighbors will ask us what’s “wrong” with them, here are some things to look for.

The most important, really the only test needed, is this: Anything which claims to offer experience, knowledge, guidance, power, comfort or help of a spiritual nature must be centered in Jesus Christ: His becoming flesh, His Cross, Death and Resurrection. ‘There is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:12) You will find that many books, while they may speak of Jesus or Christ, do not have Him as their center. The ‘spiritual power’ which they offer does not spring from His Cross and Resurrection. Often the ‘Christ’ of whom they speak is a name for a ‘world spirit’ or other figure and is not the specific Jesus who was born of the Virgin Mary in first-century Palestine, died on the Cross, and rose from the dead. Our Lord said, ‘there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.’ (Matt. 24:24) In most false spiritual teaching the real humanity of Jesus is minimized, and especially His suffering and death. Our Lord’s strongest rebuke in the Gospel is given to His friend and chief apostle, St. Peter, when he did not want to hear of the Cross. (Matt. 16:23).

A similar essential test is that a truly Christian book will call on us to fear God, repent of our sins, and take up our Cross. Taking up our Cross means embracing the sufferings of life as a means of uniting ourselves with Christ and putting to death in us all evil and self-will. ‘Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.’ (Matt. 16:24 ff) In most false teaching the emphasis is on comfort, success, or ‘fulfilment’, never on self-denial.

Other ‘marks of the beast’ will be mentioned briefly; if you see these in a book, be suspicious:

1. The claim to present some special knowledge or experience heretofore secret. God’s truths are revealed to everyone; it’s just that few are willing to follow them.

2. ‘Near death experiences’ populated by ‘angels of light’ suggesting that death is not to be feared. The Orthodox fathers unanimously counsel us to fear death as a time of spiritual trial and struggle, when Satan tries to lure us away. St. Anthony says, ‘This is the great work of a man: always to take the blame for his own sins before God and to expect temptation to his last breath.’ Many of the visions people claim to have seen may well be demons. St. Paul warns us that ‘Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.’ (2 Cor. 11:14). It is especially suspicious that almost none of these stories present any concern with judgement or repentance.

3. Any suggestion that the goal of spirituality is to lose one’s personal identity in some kind of ‘world soul’, or that souls existed before conception or will be reincarnated. Christians believe that each person is totally unique and will live forever. History is not cyclical or determined, but this world’s time is the arena of our free decisions which have eternal consequences. Orthodox Christians seek union with God by offering our wills in obedience to God, but we remain free and unique persons. The model of our unity with God and with each other is the Blessed Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are totally one in will and action and love, but each still is a distinct person.

4. Orthodox Christians honor angels and saints, but always as messengers and servants of God, never separate from Him. In the Bible and Christian experience, an encounter with an angel or saint is generally a frightening experience; the angel’s first words are ‘Fear not.’ In the Orthodox Christian tradition, an experience of an angel or saint may bring some word for an individual’s guidance, but not any new doctrine. Jesus Christ is God’s definitive Word; although we can grow in our understanding of Him, we do not expect any new revelation or doctrine. St. Paul says, ‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.’ Gal. 1:8)

5. A true Christian book is usually not ‘comforting’; neither was an encounter with Christ in His earthly life. St. Peter ‘fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’ (Luke 5:8) A true Christian book calls on us to take responsibility for our sins and repent of them, and take up our Cross and follow Him. This will ultimately produce peace and comfort but may initially be very uncomfortable as we are asked to confront our sins and delusions. St. Paul says, ‘The word of God is quick [alive], and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.’ (Heb. 4:12). The Lord says, ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.’ (John 14:27)

A helpful resource from a Protestant point of view on groups promulgating false mystical teaching is The Watchman Fellowship. For those hungry for trustworthy Orthodox Christian books on prayer and the spiritual life, here are some suggestions:

The Orthodox Handbook: Vol 4, Spirituality by Father Thomas Hopko.

The Way of a Pilgrim (anonymous).

The Way of the Ascetics by Tito Coliander.

Collections of sayings of the Desert Fathers of Egypt.

The lives of Orthodox saints from all periods.

The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos (Timothy Ware).

source: http://www.pravmir.com/article_484.html

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

2009-10-07T14:08:00.000-04:00

Where is the cradle of Christianity—Europe or Africa? After teaching historical and systematic theology, Oden is surprisingly just discovering what other scholars have argued for some time: that the earliest contours of Christianity can be easily traced to Africa. After all, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Plotinus and Augustine—to name only a few early Christian thinkers—were Africans. In this tiresome and repetitious book, Oden belabors the already well-established notion that Christianity's roots can be found in Africa. He does draw helpfully on his work on the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series to demonstrate that the intellectual contours of Christianity—academics, exegesis, dogmatics, ecumenics, monasticism, philosophy, and dialectics—developed in Africa. However, Peter Brown (Augustine of Hippo) and other writers have clearly recognized this contribution, and Oden's naïve and hyperbolic book is more embarrassing than enlightening. Oden's study is most suited to those who are entirely new to the debate and who will benefit from resources such as a time line of early African Christianity and a reading list for further investigation of the subject. (Jan.)

"How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind is a bold call to rehabilitate the earliest African contributions to the shaping of world Christianity. As such, it is a major resource for all people interested in the history of the Christian movement. Oden's focus on the intellectual dimension of Africans' role in the formation of Christian culture may surprise some, but it is a much-needed welcome corrective to the assumptions held by many. In my opinion, this book is one of the most significant contributions to the literature on world Christianity. Must reading!" -- Tite Tiénou, Dean and Professor of Theology of Mission Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

"Rarely has a work of such brevity distilled so much vintage wisdom with such elan. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind fills a crucial gap between the early church in Africa and Western Christianity, and represents a timely challenge to Christian Africans and to a post-Christian West. It will be impossible--and foolhardy-- to ignore this book." -- Lamin Sanneh, Professor of World Christianity and of History, Yale University

An Orthodox Interpretation of the Gift of the Spirit

2009-10-07T12:11:00.003-04:00

Clark Carlton writes that since his conversion to Orthodoxy, he has continued to dialogue with Protestants. While he says he has not had a problem answering Protestant notions such as sola scriptura or predestination. However, he has always had trouble dealing with questions of tongue and other gifts of the Spirit. According to Carlton, Father Alexis' book, In Peace Let Us Pray to the Lord, gave him a truly Orthodox answer.

What makes Father Alexis' book so powerful is the fact that he is a monk on Mt. Athos. Mt Athos is for the Orthodox the very center if its spiritual practice and experience. It is there, in that laboratory of the heart, that countless monks have purified their hearts through ascetic effort and have been granted the vision of the Uncreated Light of the True Godhead. Father Alexis draws on the one thousand year history of the Holy Mountain and its Saints to provide the definitive Orthodox interpretation of the Gifts of the Spirit.

Readers will be shocked to learn that much of the modern interpretation of the gift of tongues is based on a serious mistranslation of the Scriptures. Father Alexis clears this matter up and explains the meaning and significance of the gift of tongues from ascetical mystical tradition of the Church.

This book is a must read for any Orthodox pastor or teacher, for any Charismatic or Pentecostal interested in the Orthodox Church, and any Orthodox layman who wants to learn more about his faith and its relationship to modern American culture.

Of Preaching in America (Trilogy for Christ, Pt 2)

2009-10-01T11:47:00.000-04:00

As a Syriac Orthodox Christian, El-Khoury takes issue with the "feel good" and easy brand of Christianity in the USA. El-Khoury a master theologian, teacher, linguist and author of many works "debates" here the likes of Jimmy Swaggart, Billy Graham ,Spong and other great names of Protestantism. Not only does he find and negate their teachings, by using and quoting scriptures, but goes on the offensive on may theological fronts especially on Mary, the Eucharist, the rapture and eschatology.

The book is a defence of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity against a Protestant tradition ever more divisive and liberal in its teachings.

Thomas El-Khoury is uncompromising when it comes to refuting the Protestant liberal treatment of the same Bible that they preach. Sola Scriptura a la Thomas El-Khoury becomes very Catholic and very Orthodox.

Simple Guides The Orthodox Church

2009-09-30T11:33:00.000-04:00

THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU

• to appreciate the depth and beauty of the dominant form of Christianity in Greece, Russia and much of Eastern Europe

• to understand the tenets, nature and holy days of Orthodox belief

• to recognize the physical features of an Orthodox church, and the spiritual significance of icons

• to know what to expect and how to conduct yourself during Orthodox services and ceremonies

Orthodoxy is the dominant form of Christianity in Greece, Russia, parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Its practices are largely unfamiliar in the West, and have remained essentially unchanged since the earliest days of the faith. This lucid introduction outlines the tenets, nature and holy days of Orthodox belief with the Western reader in mind. It describes the physical church, especially icons, services, and common practices, and offers advice to visitors on how to conduct themselves so that they are accepted and feel comfortable.

Several chapters concern the life of Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity; others trace the origins and history of the Church, with particular attention to its great champion, Constantine the Great. The present structure of the Church is described in brief, and the split between the Eastern and the Western Churches is related with differences clearly explained.

The great antiquity and beauty of its liturgy, its essentially minimal hierarchy and its mystical yet pragmatic approach make the Orthodox religion a powerful medium for its profound and universal message. This deceptively simple volume takes the reader on a journey to the heart of the Christian tradition.

ACCESS THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS

Simple Guides: Religion is a series of concise, accessible introductions to the world’s major religions. Written by experts in the field, they offer an engaging and sympathetic description of the key concepts, beliefs and practices of different faiths.

Ideal for spiritual seekers and travellers alike, Simple Guides aims to open the doors of perception. Together the books provide a reliable compass to the world’s great spiritual traditions, and a point of reference for further exploration and discovery. By offering essential insights into the core values, customs and beliefs of different
societies, they also enable visitors to be aware of the cultural sensibilities of their hosts, and to behave in a way that fosters mutual respect and understanding.

About the Author
KATHERINE CLARK is a writer, editor and translator of German and Greek. After completing her MA at the University of Michigan, she spent a number of years teaching and writing in Greece, where she first encountered Orthodoxy. Following years of study and discussion with Orthodox monks, priests and laypersons, particularly in Greece but also in Jerusalem and at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, she converted to Greek Orthodoxy in 1987. She has studied Byzantine chant and has written and translated articles about Orthodoxy and Orthodox Churches.

Ms Clark has taught languages and literature at universities and schools in the USA, Germanyand Greece, and was for thirteen years director of the Heidelberg branch of Schiller International University. Later employed with Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, she served as liaison to Greenpeace in Athens. She now lives with her husband in Germany and Greece.

Fellow Workers With God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis

2009-09-28T11:30:00.001-04:00

...a careful historical-theological analysis and comprehensive coverage of the major primary and secondary sources....providing the reader with a crisp, well-informed guide through the major issues. --Paul M. Blowers-Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History-Emmanuel School of Religion

This is highly to be commended [Russell] has managed an enviable feat for a writer hitting a marvelous literary style and tone of approach....making high theology understandable. --Fr. John McGuckin -Professor of Early Church History - Union Theological Seminary

Product Description
Asked about the Orthodox doctrine of salvation, many people will say it has to do with theosis or deification, yet few can explain what theosis actually means. Normal Russell builds on his magisterial study, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, to present this complex teaching of the Fathers with uncompromising scholarship and welcome clarity. The book will interest specialists and non-specialists alike.

Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity

2009-09-27T11:29:00.000-04:00

How did a country wracked by civil war, devastated by famine, and overshadowed by tyranny incubate a major breakthrough in modern mathematics? In the origins of descriptive set theory, Graham and Kantor (both self-described secular rationalists) confront the puzzling cultural dynamics that converted religious mysticism into mathematical insight. The authors particularly probe the surprising way that a religious heresy (Name Worshipping) emboldened the Russian mathematicians who finally surmounted the theoretical difficulties that had overwhelmed earlier pioneers in set theory. Though readers unschooled in higher mathematics may stumble over some concepts (such as denumberable subsets or the hierarchy of alephs), the authors generally succeed in translating principles into a nonspecialist’s vocabulary. Readers thus share in both the perplexities of the French rationalists defeated by the mysteries of infinite sets and the triumphs of the Russian scholars who penetrated those mysteries by deploying strategies strangely similar to devotional practices for naming the Divine. But the authors illuminate more than the psychology of a mathematical revolution; their narrative also exposes the tangle of ideological ambitions and sexual passions that transformed some brilliant researchers into treacherous tools of Soviet inquisitors and doomed others as their victims. A candid and searching analysis, restoring human drama to seemingly sterile formulas.

Review
The intellectual drama will attract readers who are interested in mystical religion and the foundations of mathematics. The personal drama will attract readers who are interested in a human tragedy with characters who met their fates with exceptional courage.
--Freeman Dyson (20090423)

At the end of the nineteenth century, three young French mathematicians--Émile Borel, René Baire and Henri Lebesgue--built on the work of Georg Cantor to conceive a new theory of functions that in a few years transformed mathematical analysis. When their work met with skepticism, they began to doubt it and abandoned further investigation. In Russia, under the leadership of Dmitry Egorov, a group of Moscow mathematicians picked up the torch. Animated by a mystical tradition known as Name Worshipping, they found the creativity to name the new objects of the French theory of functions. And they changed the face of the mathematical world.
--Bernard Bru, emeritus, University of Paris V (20090322)

A passionate confluence of mathematical creation and mystical practices is at the center of this extraordinary account of the emergence of set theory in Russia in the early twentieth century. The starkly drawn contrast with mathematical developments in France illuminates the story, and the book is electric with portraits of the great mathematicians involved: the tragic, the unfortunate, the villainous, the truly admirable. The authors offer an account of Infinity that is brief, deft, serious, and accessible to non-mathematicians, and their evocation of the mathematical circles of the period is so intimately written that one feels as if one had lived, worked, and suffered alongside the protagonists. Graham and Kantor have given us an amazing piece of mathematical history.
--Barry Mazur, Harvard University (20090430)

Last week I read one of the most interesting books I've encountered so far this year, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, just published by Harvard University Press. I'll be writing more about this book, but in the meantime I wanted to let you know about it. Many books in the science-and-religion conversation tediously cover the same ground. This book comes from a fresh angle--the world of mathematics and the world of "science" are not the same, but they overlap--and it tells a fascinating story. I found it absolutely riveting. And it's encouraging to see two secular scholars doing their best to be scrupulously fair in representing religious thinkers whose worldview is very different from their own.
--John Wilson (Books & Culture 20090616)

It is a story of the persistence of intellectual life against the wrecking tide of history.
--Jascha Hoffman (Nature 20090701)

In the early 20th century, mathematicians grappled with the concept of infinity, relying heavily on set theory to prove and define it. The French mathematicians, rationalists not fond of abstraction (particularly abstractions with spiritual overtones), went head-to-head with the Russians, who had always linked mathematics to philosophy, religion and ideology. Name Worshipping played a key role in bringing the two closer together. Graham and Kantor do a beautiful job of fleshing out the key players in this gripping drama--nothing less than a struggle to prove the existence of God.
--Susan Salter Reynolds (Los Angeles Times )

This absorbing book tells astonishing stories about some of the most important developments in mathematics of the past century...Perhaps the most moving section of the book is that dealing with the famous Moscow School of Mathematics in Soviet times. Its origins are traced to the Lusitania seminar established by Egorov and Luzin (the source of the name "Lusitania" is obscure). The enthusiasm that these teachers inspired in their students is clearly conveyed, as is the atmosphere of intellectual excitement, despite the freezing lecture rooms (the rule that lectures could not take place if the room temperature fell below -5C was ignored)...This is a remarkable book, illuminating the history of 20th-century mathematics and its practitioners. The stories it tells are important and too little known. It is clearly a labor of love and deserves a wide audience: it is an outstanding portrayal of mathematics as a fundamentally human activity and mathematicians as human beings.
--Tony Mann (Times Higher Education )

The most unusual book I have read this year.
--Alex Beam (Boston Globe )

Fifty years ago, C. P. Snow gave a soon-to-be famous lecture on the "Two Cultures" of modern society, the culture of the humanities and the culture of science, and the need to bridge the gap between them. Today we are more likely to hear debates about the alleged gulf between science and religion. Both divides are bridged in this superb book, which takes us from French rationalism at the turn of the 20th century to a thriving center of world-class mathematics in Moscow, where the presiding figures were also devout Russian Orthodox believers of a mystical bent.
--John Wilson (Christianity Today )

Merton & Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart & the Eastern Church

2009-09-26T11:22:00.001-04:00

Thomas Merton was Roman Catholic and a member of one of Catholicism's strictest monastic orders. Nonetheless, throughout his religious life one sees the remarkable influence of Christian traditions best preserved within the Eastern Orthodox Church: iconography, the Jesus Prayer, and the apophatic spiritual path linked with Mt. Athos and Sinai. He treasured the sayings and stories of the Desert Fathers and was familiar with the Philokalia.

Merton and Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart collects all of Merton's writing on topics in Eastern Christianity. He studied and published on the writings that emanated from the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions, both in the early centuries of the Church and during revival of the monastic traditions of Orthodoxy on Mount Athos during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

His writing on Hesychasm, the practices surrounding the "Prayer of Jesus" that have as their aim preparing the spiritual seeker for union with the Godhead, are of particular contemporary importance. Western seekers have looked to Buddhism and the East for a thoroughly psychological and spiritual method of meditation. But, in fact, a Christian tradition, just as analytic and developed and more culturally palatable to the West, exists and is readily available.

Merton's commentary is accompanied by major new essays by scholars in the fields of Eastern Christianity and Merton studies: Bishop Kallistos Ware, Father Donald Allchin of England, and James Forest of the U.S. and Holland, among others. Both Allchin and Forest knew Merton personally and bring salient details of his interest in the Christian East together with a view of the man and his writing.

Merton and Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart is the second in a multi-volume series that exposes Thomas Merton's dialogues with traditions other than his own. The first volume, Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story, has met with critical success and found a wide audience among those interested in Merton, arguably one of the twentieth-century's top writers in the field of religion and spirituality.

About the Author
Jonathan Montaldo is president of the International Thomas Merton Society and the Immediate past director of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. A former Jesuit seminarian, Montaldo studied Merton at a graduate level and has published extensively on him. Montaldo is co-editor with Brother Patrick Hart (a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani) of The Intimate Merton and is sole editor of the second volume of the Thomas Merton Journals, published by HarperSanFrancisco. Other forthcoming works include Dialogues with Silence: Thomas Merton's Prayers & Drawings.

Meditations on a Theme

2009-09-25T11:20:00.001-04:00

Metropolitan Anthony (Anthony Bloom) caught the imagination of countless people by his broadcasts. Their content was uncomfortable and challenging but they drew huge audiences. He then started publishing books and one of his first was was Meditations on a Theme.

The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God

2009-09-24T11:16:00.001-04:00

In the earliest centuries of faith, Christians in the deserts of Palestine and Africa sought a short prayer that could be easily repeated, in order to acquire the habit of “prayer without ceasing.” The result was The Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” This jewel of Eastern Christianity aims at enabling a person to be in God’s presence, rather than to focus on feelings or thoughts about God. The first section of The Jesus Prayer offers a concise overview of the history, theology, and spirituality of Orthodoxy, so that the Prayer can be understood in its native context. Following, is a conversational question-and-answer format that takes the reader through practical steps for adopting this profound practice in everyday life.

Kerala: Cradle of Christianityin Asia

2009-09-20T16:08:00.001-04:00

Americans seem to find the need to send missionaries around the world to places where Christianity has been since the beginning. Perhaps what Americans should be doing is bringing Christians from Africa, India, Asia, and other places to America so that they can learn what Orthodox have known and taught since the days of Christ...the fulness of His Gospel message.

In this video, you learn more about Kerala, the cradle of Christianity in Asia, where St. Thomas came after Christ's Resurrection, and where Christianity still survives even though some Christians from the West have battled it through the ages.

H.B. Catholicos Mor Baselios Thomas I

2009-07-21T14:56:00.000-04:00

H.B. Catholicos Mor Baselios Thomas I: "Catholicos of India
Aboon Mor Baselios Thomas I

[Presiding Hierarch of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church in India]"

Close to Home: One Orthodox Mother's Quest for Patience, Peace and Perseverance

2009-07-13T23:05:00.002-04:00

The author, Molly Sabourin, discussing her new book, "Close to Home," coming Spring of 2009 from Conciliar Press.

The journey home

2009-07-03T18:57:00.001-04:00

We are all on a journey. Christ has prepared the way and He guides us if we let me. He helps us when we need assistance. In this talk Father Theodosius talks about this journey.

Peshitta Bible

2009-07-03T13:23:00.001-04:00

This handsome new edition of the authoritative English translation of the Aramaic (Syriac) Old and New Testaments--the language of Jesus--clarifies difficult passages and offers fresh insight on the Bible's message.

The Peshitta is the official Bible of the Church of the East and often refered to as the "Aramaic Bible." The name Peshitta in Aramaic means "Straight", in other words, the original and pure New Testament. The Peshitta is the only authentic and pure text which contains the books in the New Testament that were written in Aramaic, the Language of Mshikha (the Messiah) and His Disciples.

Aramaic is the ancient language of the Semitic family group, which includes the Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Hebrews, and Arabs. In fact, a large part of the Hebrew and Arabic languages is borrowed from Aramaic, including the Alphabet. The modern Hebrew (square) script is called "Ashuri", "Ashuri" is the Hebrew name for Assyrian, the name being used to signify the ancestor of the Assyrians, Ashur the son of Shem, the son of Noah (Genesis 10:22). Aramaic is quoted in the very first book of the Bible, Berisheth (Genesis) in Chapter 31:47. In fact, many portions of the Old Testament are penned originally in Aramaic, including Daniel chapter 2:4 thru chapter 7 and parts of the book of Ezra, as were some notable Jewish prayers, such as the kaddish. Furthermore, Papias of Hierapolis is quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea as affirming that Evangelist Matthew first "wrote the sayings of Jesus" in Aramaic.

The first known inscriptions of Aramaic date to the late tenth or early ninth century B.C. In a phenomenal wave of expansion, Aramaic spread over Palestine and Syria and large tracts of Asia and Egypt, replacing many languages, including Akkadian and Hebrew. For about one thousand years it served as the official and written language of the Near East, officially beginning with the conquests of the Assyrian Empire, which had adopted Aramaic as its official language, replacing Akkadian.

During the later Chaldean (Neo-Babylonian) and Persian conquests, Aramaic had become the international medium of exchange. Despite Hellenistic influences, especially in the cities, that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Aramaic remained the vernacular of the conquered peoples in the Holy Land, Syria, Mesopotamia and the adjacent countries. It ceded only to Arabic in the ninth century A.D., two full centuries after the Islamic conquests of Damascus in 633, and Jerusalem in 635. Aramaic has never been totally supplanted by Arabic. Aramaic had been adopted by the deported Israelites of Transjordan, exiled from Bashan and Gilead in 732 B.C. by Tiglath-Pileser III, the tribes of the Northern Kingdom by Sargon II who took Samaria in 721, and the two tribes of the Southern Kingdom of Judah who were taken into captivity to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 587. Hence, the Jews who returned from the Babylonian Captivity brought Aramaic back with them to the Holy Land, and this continued to be their native tongue throughout the lifetime of Eshoo Mshikha.

Aramaic can be dated to five periods, dating from inscriptions that go back to the first millennium B.C.:

Old Aramaic, 925-700
Official or Imperial (Assyrian) Aramaic, 700-200 (when the language was still uniform)
Middle Aramaic, 200 B.C. - 200 A.D.
Late Aramaic, 200-700
Modern Aramaic, 700 to our time

This translation of the Old and New Testaments is based on Peshitta manuscripts which have comprised the accepted Bible of all those Christians who have used Syriac as their language of prayer and worship for many centuries. The Church of the East and some noted Western scholars dispute the belief of modern scholarship that the originals of the Four Gospels and other parts of the New Testament were written in Greek. In any case, Aramaic speech is an underlying factor and New Testament writers drew on documents written in Aramaic. Syriac is the literary dialect of Aramaic. From the Mediterranean east into India, the Peshitta is still the Bible of preference among Christians.

George M. Lamsa, the translator, devoted the major part of his life to this work. He was an Assyrian and a native of ancient Bible lands. He and his people retained Biblical customs and Semitic culture, which had perished elsewhere. With this background and his knowledge of the Aramaic (Syriac) language, he has recovered much of the meaning that has been lost in other translations of the Scriptures. There is a section on the problems of translating from the Aramaic to the Greek.

Manuscripts used were the Codex Ambrosianus for the Old Testament and the Mortimer-McCawley manuscript for the New Testament. Comparisons have been made with other Peshitta manuscripts, including the oldest dated manuscript in existence. The term Peshitta means straight, simple, sincere and true, that is, the original. Even the Moslems in the Middle East accept and revere the Peshitta text.

Are you saved? - an Orthodox Christian answer.

2009-07-01T12:02:00.001-04:00

Thirsting For God in a Land of Shallow Wells

2009-06-16T12:59:00.001-04:00

Beginning in the street ministry days of the Jesus Movement, Matthew Gallatin devoted more than 20 years to evangelical Christian ministry. He was a singer/songwriter, worship leader, youth leader, and Calvary Chapel pastor. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted a painful reality: no matter how hard he tried, he was never able to experience the God whom he longed to know. In encountering Orthodox Christianity, he finally found the fullness of the Faith.

In Thirsting for God, philosophy professor Gallatin expresses many of the struggles that a Protestant will encounter in coming face to face with Orthodoxy: such things as Protestant relativism, rationalism versus the Orthodox sacramental path to God, and the unity of Scripture and Tradition. He also discusses praying with icons, praying formal prayers, and many other Orthodox traditions.

An outstanding book that will help Orthodox readers more deeply appreciate their faith and will give Protestant readers a more thorough understanding of the Church.

Matthew Gallatin teaches Philosophy at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He resides in Post Falls, Idaho, with his wife, Alice, and daughter, Kaci. Son Joshua lives in nearby Coeur d’Alene. The Gallatins are active members of St. John the Baptist Antiochian Orthodox Church in Post Falls.

Gallatin’s parents, both sincere Christians, instilled in him a commitment to seek out the truth about Christ—to discover what Christ really taught, and what He really expects of His children. This thirst for truth led his parents to embrace Seventh-day Adventism when Gallatin was thirteen. Paradoxically, the devotion to truth that his parents had cultivated in him eventually led Gallatin to question Adventist doctrine. At twenty-eight, after an intense five-year investigation of his Adventist beliefs, Gallatin left the church.

In time, Gallatin was ordained as a Calvary Chapel minister. His pastoral experience brought him face to face with an obvious problem: Bible-believing Protestants have different versions of the truth. Protestants hold contrary opinions about the nature of God, and contradictory notions about how people are saved. Making the problem worse is the fact that Protestants arrive at these various interpretations of truth by applying the same doctrine: sola scriptura, the belief that "the Scriptures alone" determine truth.

Given these circumstances, Gallatin saw that a Protestant can never have any assurance that his or her beliefs about God are actually true. The truth about God can never be anything more than one’s disputable personal opinion. He simply could not accept that God would leave His children so divided, confused, and unclear about Himself.

Gallatin’s quest for the truth about Christ ultimately led him to an encounter with the history and teachings of the Early Church. Through his studies, he came to understand that Christian truth is not discovered by interpreting the Scriptures. Rather, knowing the truth about God simply requires learning what Christians have believed about God since the beginning of the Christian faith. For a Christian, then, truth is a matter of historical fact, not theological interpretation.

Gallatin also discovered that the teachings and practices of the Early Church have been faithfully preserved in only one place—within the life, teachings, and worship practices of the Eastern Orthodox churches. While Roman Catholicism has retained much of the original Christian faith, it also has made changes and additions to it. Protestantism has simply discarded the bulk of those early Christian beliefs and practices.

Gallatin has recounted the steps on his journey into Orthodoxy in a new book entitled Thirsting for God in a Land of Shallow Wells. The book, available from Conciliar Press, details the self-contradictions that Gallatin discovered within Protestantism. It also presents the case for Eastern Orthodoxy, defending many of those early Church doctrines and practices that contemporary Protestants may question: liturgical worship, formal prayer, veneration of the Virgin Mary and the Saints, infant baptism, and the literal Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Humanity In War: Frontline Photography Since 1860

2009-06-15T20:02:00.001-04:00

Humanity In War: Frontline Photography Since 1860

By Claire O'Neill

Photography and the Red Cross came into existence at about the same time, in the second half of the 1800s. Photographs of war quickly became some of the most disturbing, but also the most mobilizing, means of communication. Recognizing the power of a photo, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began preserving and archiving images almost from the beginning. Now it's taking a look back through the archives in a new book called Humanity in War, a collection of over 200 photos dating back to the 1860s, covering both warfare and the humanitarian action that mitigates it.

For full screen, click on the four-cornered arrow icon in the viewer's bottom right.

Award-winning war photographer James Nachtwey, whose work is featured in the book, writes in the introduction, "Although it has not always been regarded like this, the fact is that documentary photography and humanitarian work exist symbiotically: one of the primary functions of photography is to complement and support the work of humanitarian agencies."

Divided into chapters by date, the photos take us from the trenches of World War I France, to a Nigerian feeding center during the Biafra conflict of the late 1960s, to the West Bank barrier today. Children wait to be repatriated from Switzerland after World War II; young women stare at a dead body in the Torola River during El Salvador's civil war in 1986; a man stands amid the ruins of his home in Lebanon in 2007. The photographs -- taken by both photojournalists and aid workers in the field -- show the total devastation of war, as well as the power of an image. Without these photos from the frontline, war would be just an idea to those not fighting it, and it certainly would not have a face. It's the faces, after all -- the people in photos, the humanity in war -- that makes us care. Nachtwey continues:

Photographs are not cold documents that merely prove something happened. They put a human face on events that might otherwise appear to be abstract or ideological ... Photography gives a voice to the voiceless. It's a call to action.

Humanity In War was released last month to coincide with International Red Cross and Red Crescent Day. It can be purchased online and in select cities.

Cosmic Man: The Theology of St. Gregory of Nyssa/ Ca 330 to 395 A.D.

2009-06-14T11:45:00.000-04:00

Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy (Studies in Neoplatonism-Ancient and Modern, 9)

2009-06-14T11:42:00.002-04:00

Explores connections between Neoplatonism and Indian philosophy. BACKCOVER: During the last two centuries a remarkable similarity between the philosophical system of Plotinus (205-270 a.d.) and those of various Hindu philosophers in various centuries, including some that lived prior to the Third Century a.d. has been discovered. This book addresses the possibility of any direct influence of Indian thought upon Plotinus and his teacher Ammonius Saccas (185-250 a.d.) or even upon their major source, Plato. Are Platonism and Plotinism, and the thought patterns in Western religion, literature, and art derived from them, to be considered as mere variations on themes found in ancient Hindu philosophy or are they pure evolutionary products of Greek philosophy? The essays in this book show the actual similarities in themes or philosophical systems that exist between certain Western Neoplatonic writers and some major Hindu philosophers and deals with the arguments, pro and con, of the case for an Indian source for the thought of Plotinus. Some of the essays are critical studies involving the comparison of technical terms and linguistic considerations, whereas others are only general comparisons. An exercise in comparative philosophy, this book constitutes a de facto East-West philosophical dialogue. It concludes with an extensive critical essay on the role of ritual, myth, and magic in Neoplatonism, an ancillary topic relevant to a comparison of Eastern and Western religious thought.

Breaking the Chains of Addition

2009-06-12T11:34:00.001-04:00

"Breaking the Chains of Addiction" is a self-help book with information and quotes obtained from Eastern Orthodox Christian spiritual books. The author helps the addicted reader attain to that blessed 'passionless state' which the saints have acquired through the spiritual methods in the Christian world dating back to the third century. So many of us struggle with addictions of one kind or another; they may be severe such as alcoholism or drug abuse or more hidden such as sexual addictions, smoking, even addictions to crutches like TV, the Internet and video games. Within the Orthodox Tradition there lies a very specific "cure" for all addictions large or small. Pastors, priests and lay people alike will find "Breaking the Chains..." is a terrific source of inspiration and a great book for group study that offers an easy-to-understand guide to Orthodox monastic practices that all of us can use in our daily lives.

Steps of Transformation

2009-06-11T11:31:00.001-04:00

"...a humble and realistic book, full of hope, that bears witness to the immense patience and mercy of God. -- Bishop Kallistos Ware, author of The Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Way

Fr. Meletios Webber… relates the Steps to Orthodox Christian spirituality with clarity, conviction, and appealing personal engagement. -- Fr. Thomas Hopko, author and speaker

Steps of Transformation is very simple, easy to read, and right on target about...alcoholism. -- Floyd Frantz, CAC, St. Dimitrie Addictions Treatment Center, Romania

Addictions and struggles with passions are rampant in our culture. Fr. Meletios Webber, an Orthodox priest with a doctorate in counseling, helps us to understand addiction and explores ways to overcome it. He clearly and skillfully explains the Twelve Steps of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. In correlating the Twelve Steps with basic Orthodox theology, Fr. Mel identifies the implications for Orthodox, and for all Christians. Using examples from the life of the Orthodox Church, he shows how the Steps can be valuable resource for our own spiritual journey. With an introduction by Bishop Kallistos War.

An Alcoholic's Prayer (Kindle Edition)

2009-06-10T11:28:00.000-04:00

The monk who grew prayer

2009-06-09T11:15:00.000-04:00

Although ostensibly a children’s book, The Monk Who Grew Prayer appeals to a wide variety of ages and literary tastes. A monk prays deep in the forest. It looks like he is doing just simple, ordinary tasks, such as chopping wood and and tending to his garden. But as he works he is really growing prayer. The monk prays continually throughout the day and night, and, as the seasons pass, he becomes a holy man.

This delightful, beautifully illustrated book teaches children that no matter what they are doing, or what hour of the day it is, they too, can pray.

Understanding the Christian Orthodox Faith - Part 1

2009-06-08T12:42:00.001-04:00

Understanding the Orthodox Faith is an introductory video guide to learning the basics about the Christian Orthodox faith. Ellinas Multimedia has combined interviews with Orthodox Priests along with beautiful photography inside Orthodox churches to teach you about the following:

* When did the Orthodox faith begin?
* Who was the founder of the Orthodox faith?
* What is meant by Apostolic Succession?
* What does Holy Tradition mean?
* Why are there icons in Orthodox churches?
* Are Orthodox Christians "saved?"
* How does the Orthodox faith view the Virgin Mary?
* Are Orthodox Christians "born again?"
* Why is the Orthodox faith considered "the best kept secret?"

On the Prayer of Jesus

2009-06-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

Thousands have fallen in love with the anonymously authored book The Way of a Pilgrim—the account of an ordinary man's encounter with the Eastern Orthodox Christian practice of the Jesus Prayer, which consists of the constant repetition of the short phrase, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me." Here is the perfect introduction to this life-changing practice, as it was taught by one of the great spiritual lights of Russia. Bishop Ignatius Brianchaniov (1807–1867) provides wise instruction and advice covering all aspects of the practice, from how to get started, to approaching difficulties that arise, to dealing with friends and family who don't get what you're doing, to making this prayer (also called the Prayer of the Heart) the foundation of your life.

Sryan Orthodox Church in Jerusalem - English

2009-06-06T11:18:00.001-04:00

In this video you hear the historical story and importance of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

The Way of a Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way

2009-06-06T11:08:00.000-04:00

Christianity in India

2009-06-05T11:39:00.000-04:00

Christians have lived in India since the early centuries of this era. In South India they believe their ancestors received the Gospel from the apostle Thomas. Written by two of the country's foremost theologians, this book traces the fascinating history of the various Christian communities, and describes the role of Christians in education, social services, multilingual publishing, and the freedom struggle. The first of its kind for the general reader, Christianity in India is a priceless compendium of history, theology, folklore and anecdote, to be relished and referenced by anyone curious about the Indian story and practice of one of the world's major faiths.

Praying with icons

2009-06-05T11:13:00.000-04:00

Recent years have seen a marked increase in the popular and ecumenical appeal of icons (for centuries an integral feature of Orthodox Christianity). Jim Forest's Praying With Icons offers a simple introduction to the tradition of icons with special emphasis on their practical function in the spiritual life. Beautifully illustrated both with color plans and b/w photography, Praying With Icons begins with a history of iconography. Icons are not simply illustrations or "art" in the usual sense, but aids to prayer and contemplation, windows on the divine. Forest also provides a personal and practical guide to how one prays with icons. Forest then concludes with a series of meditative reflections on some of the most typical icons, including the Annunciation, the Nativity, Christ's Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, representations of Mary, the trinity, and the Saints. Praying With Icons is a superlative introduction to icons and is highly recommended for readers seeking to expand their spiritual experience to encompass the entire Christian spiritual legacy.

Beginning to pray

2009-06-05T11:04:00.000-04:00

“Prayer is obviously a relationship, an encounter a way in which we have a relationship with the living God,” says Metropolitan ANTHONY Bloom.

The 5th and final chapter of his classic, “Beginning to Pray” is titled Addressing God. How we address God reveals the nature of our relationship with God and may determine the warmth and depth of relationship as well. We can understand more clearly the scandal of Jesus’ revelation that the Almighty God of the Universe is to be addressed the way little children address their dads by calling Him Abba. This previously unheard of intimacy with God can be as difficult for us today as it was for the publicans and pharisees we read about on the pages of the New Testament. But, Met. ANTHONY says there is no prayer as long as there is ceremony between us and God, as long as we cannot speak to Him. This, of course, is all the more interesting given that Metropolitan ANTHONY was an Archbishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He goes on to say that as long as we only call God by terms like, “The Almighty,” we will remain at a distance from Him.

The Psalmist had no problem moving from restrained forms of address to bursting out with, “You, my Joy!” We must also address the Lord with personal, relational names. We must draw near to Him and He will draw near to us.

source: http://frjamescoles.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/beginning-to-pray-addressing-god/

Theology of a Classless Society

2009-06-03T16:00:00.000-04:00

An Indian Orthodox bishop looks at society. It is an important work and good read. While there are no new copies available, there are several used copies in excellent condition. Don't miss this one. It is not what you expect from the title.

The titles of Christ

2009-06-03T15:57:00.001-04:00

Father Matthew the Poor (Fr. Matta El-Meskeen), the well known Coptic Orthodox Abbot of the St. Macarius Monastery from the deserts of Egypt, has fallen asleep in the Lord; however, he has left behind a great legacy. He labored to preserve so zealously the holy tradition of the Gospel as it was expounded by the early spiritual masters, like the Great Anthony, the professor of the desert, and the great ecumenical teachers, like St. Athanasius and St. Cyril. This book expounds the rich meaning of the person of the Blessed Lord of all humanity, who has offered Himself for all and wants all to be one. Father Matta's book will help every reader to return to the Lord who created us and who invites us to a perfect salvation and eternal life.

Orthodox Prayer Life by Matthew the Poor

2009-06-03T15:55:00.000-04:00

Fathers guide to contemplative life,

January 3, 2004

By	Didaskalex "Eusebius Alexandrinus" (Kellia on Calvary, Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews

Efficacy of the Interior Way:
St. Vladimir Orthodox Seminary Press, took again the narrow way of serious fellowship of the heart, to make available to English readership, "Turning the sayings of the Fathers into Prayer." The abbot of St. Macarius, where the serious vocation of unceasing prayer has been practiced in its original version called the 'Arrow Prayer,' continuously to this moment, released his contemplation on "The Paradise of the fathers," authentic, lived, and loved by all Copts old and young, lay and monastic.

A Real Life of Prayer:
Praying life or life of prayer is what preserved Christian life, Christianity is a way of abundant living given to us by our only teacher and role model, Jesus the Christ. Throughout his ministry, our Lord gave us the example of praying in every occasion, and before all decisions; early (Mark 1:35), all night (Luke 6:12), into a mountain (Mark 6:46), in desert places (Luke 5:16), and exhorted us to pray always and not to loose heart.
The desert fathers took this commandment of earnest fellowship in prayer seriously. Abba Matta own mentor, abbot of St. Samuel the confessor, was an example of continuos prayer life. When he was elected Archbishop of Alexandria, in 1959, Abba Kyrillos set his goal to lead the Copts back into prayer. His own life of prayer invited many gifts of the Holy Spirit, true faith, healing, working of miracles, prophecy, the discernment of spirits, and was a living example for Christians and Moslems alike, that attracted many to life in Christ.

The story of a Book:
Abba Matta reveals how ecumenical is life in Christ, in book's preface. He contemplated on a manuscript by a British pilgrim, who translated sayings of Russian fathers on prayer, together with other Eastern saints. From the single copy of "The Paradise of the Fathers: Original Coptic Apophthegmata Patrum," read aloud during the meals in the refractory of St. Samuel the Confessor, where he received his monastic schema, and later in the rich library of Our Lady of the Assyrians, in Nitria, where Abba Mena found him refuge from ecclesiastical tyranny, he encountered, St. Issac the Syrian, the spiritual master of his patron, in his personal, hand copied four volumes!

The Book and the Author:
I read this book first time, in its first edition, as a young teen half a century ago, meeting the author, after being assigned Patriarchal Vicar in Alexandria. CCR, Coptic church review, a pioneer patristic quarterly describes the book as;
"The first edition of this book had a great impact on the spiritual life of many Coptic and other Arabic speaking Christians, who found in it for the first time (in Arabic), the wealth of the patristic tradition"
The second enlarged edition, 1968, is my favorite, caries in its preface the unity of Byzantine and Copts when contemplation is concerned, in the words of VR George Khedr, Metropolitan of Lebanon;" For the first time(in centuries), do the Byzantine East seeks discipleship through a Coptic book"

A Brief Exposition:
This book is a condensed version of the second edition of its original language in 670 pages, with a preface, an introduction, and an epilogue on Prayer: Access into the Father's Presence.
In three consecutive parts supported and integrated with sayings of the fathers, each of the 16 chapters has a brief introduction by the enlightened abbot. The book treats in a praying tour the nature, aspects of interior activity, and impediments to prayer.
The sayings are very exhaustive, and their selection reflects the spirit of the desert father that Griffith sought in his comment on D. Burton-Christie's "The word in the desert"

The Holy Spirit: Eastern Christian Traditions

2009-06-03T15:50:00.001-04:00

Burgess provides a high-level overview of the various Eastern Traditions about the Holy Spirit. He covers not only Byzantine writers, but fathers and theologians from the various Oriental traditions, such as Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Syrian, and Church of the East traditions.

Paper, Scissors, Stone

2009-04-22T10:26:00.001-04:00

Paper, Scissors, Stone

by Tom Wayman

An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.

And, a geologist's hours with stone
nets more than a teacher's with paper
and definitely beats someone's time in a garment factory with scissors.

In addition: to manufacture paper
you need stone to extract metal to fabricate scissors
to cut the product to size.
To make scissors you must have paper to write out the specs
and a whetstone to sharpen the new edges.
Creating gravel, you require the scissor-blades of the crusher
and lots of order forms and invoices at the office.

Thus I believe there is a connection
between things
and not at all like the hierarchy of winners
of a child's game.
When a man starts insisting
he should be paid more than me
because he's more important to the task at hand,
I keep seeing how the whole process collapses
if almost any one of us is missing.
When a woman claims she deserves more money
because she went to school longer,
I remember the taxes I paid to support her education.
Should she benefit twice?
Then there's the guy who demands extra
because he has so much seniority
and understands his work so well
he has ceased to care, does as little as possible,
or refuses to master the latest techniques
the new-hires are required to know.
Even if he's helpful and somehow still curious
after his many years—

Without a machine to precisely measure
how much sweat we each provide
or a contraption hooked up to electrodes in the brain
to record the amount we think,
my getting less than him
and more than her
makes no sense to me.
Surely whatever we do at the job
for our eight hours—as long as it contributes—
has to be worth the same.

And if anyone mentions
this is a nice idea but isn't possible,
consider what we have now:
everybody dissatisfied, continually grumbling and disputing.
No, I'm afraid it's the wage system that doesn't function
except it goes on
and will
until we set to work to stop it

with paper, with scissors, and with stone.

"Paper, Scissors, Stone" by Tom Wayman from The Face of Jack Munro. © Harbour, 1986.

source: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Editor's Note: One of my favorite program on NPR is Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac. You can listen to Garrrsion reading of Tom Wayman's poem here: http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/writers_almanac/2009/04/twa_20090422_64.mp3
My plan is to print this out and post in the computer room of our employment program. And perhaps it would be good to add to the next mailing by the Mor Gregorios Community Center for help with our programs.

Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas - Many Years

2009-04-21T10:45:00.001-04:00

oran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, the 122nd successor to St. Peter in the Apostolic See of Antioch, completed 25 years in the Patriarchal See on the day of the Feast of Holy Cross, 2005. The Universal Syrian Church with its flocks spread over many nations, celebrates this unique historic occasion, of His Holiness's Silver Jubilee of the Patriarchal enthronement, with great fervour and enthusiasm. It was on September 14, 1980, the Holy father was enthroned as the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East and the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church. He is one of the very few primates of the Syrian Church who have been in the Patriarchal office for an entire quarter of a century. As a true Shepherd, His Holiness has led the Holy Church to greater glories in these years of his Patriarchal See.

His Holiness was born on April 21, 1933 into the faithful family of 'Iwas' in Mosul, Iraq. He was born as the fourth child and was named 'Seenaherib' (name of the father of St. Behnam). His Holiness had three brothers and three sisters. The forbears of Patriarch Zakka, the Iwas family, originally belonged to Jessera on Tigris; they migrated to Mosul about three hundred years ago. Some of his ancestors adorned very important posts in the Kingdom. His grand father has received an award from King Faisal I of Iraq for his excellence in his job as Chief craftsmen and architect of the State.

The father of His Holiness, Basheer Iwas, who graduated from the University in Istanbul, the then capital of Ottoman Empire, later became a Professor in the Military Engineering College there. A faithful member of Church, he was very enthusiastic in attending the Church Services regularly and also inspired others to follow his path. It was his ardent desire to mould one of his sons as a priest to serve the Holy Church. After a few years of teaching, he left for his home state in Iraq where he started a wood-working factory of his own. But unfortunately, misfortune struck the family a few years later; Basheer Iwas died of a Cardiac arrest. His Holiness was only 10 at that time. Two years later in 1945, his wife, the mother of His Holiness, also passed away. Thus the young Seenaherib, who later came to be known as Zakka, becomes parentless at a tender age of 12.

Ecclesiastical life & Graduation

After the death of his parents, Young Zakka decided to enter into the ecclesiastical life, thus fulfilling the wishes of his beloved father. But then some of his family members who felt bad about the parentless child being dragged into difficult circumstances, tried to discourage him. However our holy father, who from the age of six dreamt of becoming a monk, remained determined in his choice which finally paved the way for the family too to comply with his decision. Thus he joined the St. Ephrem Theological Seminary in Mosul in 1946 at the age of 13 and was henceforth came to be called 'Zakka'.

On November 28, 1948, young Zakka was ordained 'Koroyoo' (Deacon) by H. E. Mor Athanasius Touma Kasseer and on February 8, 1953, he was elevated to the rank of 'Afodyaknoh' (Half Deacon) by H.E. Mor Gregorios Paulos Behnam. The very next year he graduated with a diploma from the seminary.

June 6, 1954, is an important date in the life of His Holiness. The Holy father accepted the order of monastic life on that day. He was then 21. It was Mor Gregorios Paulos Behnam who ordained him Rabban (monk). His Holiness recalls this as a very special day in his life. He used to say that he always felt the God caring him greatly though his parents left him in his childhood; he prayed to God and He cared him greatly.

On December 18, 1955, the new monk was promoted to the rank of full deacon by H.E. Mor Divanasious Jirges Behanam. In the year 1955, he joined the Patriarchal Staff in Homs as an assistant to the Patriarchal Secretary.

Young Zakka's performance in schools was always excellent; he consistently scored high marks. His elementary education was in the schools at the Al-Tahra Al-Dakhilyah's church (Our Lady's church) and Mor Touma's school (St.Thomas school) at Mosul. In 1957 he graduated from the college with 97 % of marks. Thus he completed his studies with success on the fields of history, philosophy, theology and church-law. He advanced in Syriac, Arabic and English languages, and received diplomas in each of these fields.

Soon after the graduation, he joined the faculty of the seminary where he taught Syriac, Arabic and the Bible. Little later, Rabban Zakka was called to the Patriarchate by the then Patriarch of Antioch Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem I, one of the most erudite scholars and efficient administrators the Church has seen in modern times. Rabban Zakka became the second, and later the first, Secretary to the Patriarch. After the demise of Moran Mor Aprem I, he continued as First Secretary to the new Patriarch, Moran Mor Ya`qub III.

On November 17, 1957, Patriarch Mor Ya`qub III ordained him a priest. On April 15, 1959, the Patriarch decorated him with ‘the Holy cross of the grand monk’.

From 1955 to 1958 Rabban Zakka studied journalism as a part-time student and took a diploma in journalism. In 1960, he joined the General Theological College of the Episcopal Church in New York in the United States, where he studied oriental languages, philosophy and pastoral theology and mastered in the English language. The college, later in 1983, offered His Holiness an Honorary Doctorate in theology.

Rabban Zakka travelled widely, both on his own and in the company of Patriarch Ya`qub III. He was at that time fortunate to visit all the countries in the Middle East and the America. In 1962 and 1963 he was delegated by the late Patriarch to attend the two Sessions of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council as an observer. It was while at the Vatican that he was called to the Episcopal office.

Metropolitan

On November 17, 1963, Rabban Zakka was ordained Metropolitan by the Patriarch Mor Ya`qub III for the Mosul Archbishopric with title 'Severious'. Thus he came to be known as Mor Severios Zakka.

The very next year in 1964 he visited India along with the Patriarch where he participated in the Universal Synod of the Syrian Orthodox Church, held in Kottayam. He later assisted the Patriarch Mor Ya`qub III during the consecration of the first canonical Catholicos of Malankara, Mor Baselios Augen I, on May 21, 1964.

Discovery of St. Thomas relic

On September 1, 1964, during the renovation of the Madboho of the ancient St.Thomas Church at Mosul, Mor Severious Zakka discovered the remains of Apostle Thomas in the sanctuary wall. It was a memorable event in the Episcopal life of the Holy Father. In the first sermon of the Holy father when he visited India as Patriarch of Antioch in 1982 he said, “When we think of St. Thomas, our heart is particularly thrilled because we are very closely connected to St. Thomas. Even though St. Thomas enjoyed his martyrdom here in India, and was entombed in Mylapore, we were the Metropolitan of the church in which the holy relics of St. Thomas have been kept for the past many centuries. One day, unexpectedly, by the grace of God, we were led to reveal the Holy Relics of St. Thomas once again to humanity. It was unknown to the present generation, as to where the holy relic of St. Thomas was kept. But in 1964, according to the will of God, we were able to discover the Holy Relics which were kept in the walls of the sanctuary of our St. Thomas’ church in Mosul, Iraq which is the Cathedral church of our Archdiocese of Mosul.”

A portion of this Holy relic discovered by Mor Severios Zakka was presented to Malankara Church when Catholicos Mor Augen I paid a visit to the Patriarchate in 1965. In 1994, a small portion of the Holy Relic was again presented to Malankara to be kept at the ancient Mulanthuruthy Marthoman Church which is known as the 2nd Jerusalem of the Syrian Church. Three fathers of the Syrian Church who arrived from Near East were entombed in this church. The Holy Mooron was consecrated in this church once by Patriarch Moran Mor Ignatius Abded 'Aloho, in 1911. This ancient church has also been the venue for two historical Synods of the Malankara Church, one in 1876 and the other in 2004; both were held under the auspices of the Patriarchs of Antioch.

Involvement in Ecumenical movements

In 1965, Mor Severios Zakka attended the Pan Orthodox meet at Adis Ababa. He was one of the 15 theologians from all over the world who met for the unofficial consultations between Oriental and Eastern Orthodox theologians in August 1964 and later. In 1968 Mor Severios attended the Lambeth Palace Conference as an observer. He participated in the consultation between Oriental and Eastern theologians, held again, in Geneva in 1970.

In 1969 Mor Severios assumed the charge of Baghdad & Basra Archdioceses. During this period he also served as the Head of Syriac Studies and a member of the educational academy in Bagdad. In the same year he was appointed to the membership of “Academy of Iraq Culture” and to the presidency of “Academy of Syrian Language and Culture”, besides being the Chairman of its Syriac Section and an honorary member of the pro-Oriente Organization in Vienna, Austria. In 1972 he was in Pro-Orinete, Vienna, to give a lecture on “The Church and the Ecumenical Synod.” Next year he addressed them again, this time on “What makes a Council legitimate and acceptable.” The topic of his address at the Pro-Orinete in 1976 was “The need for, and signs of, communion between local churches.” Following that he was granted their Fellowship. He was also given the rare privilege of preaching in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, in the presence of the Cardinal and other Roman Catholic dignitaries, the first Syrian Orthodox Bishop to be so honoured. In 1976, 1978 and 1979 he served as a consultant on the Pontifical Commission for revision of Oriental Canon Law in the Roman Catholic Church.

At Nairobi in 1975 Mor Severios was elected to the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, which position he held till his enthronement as Patriarch in 1980. From 1995 onwards, His Holiness the Patriarch, is one of the Presidents of the World Council of Churches.

Major contributions

The Holy father who has an Honorary Doctor’s Degree in Syriac Literature from Sweden (Institute of Oriental Studies) and Diploma in Theology, Philosophy and Canon Law, has many works to his credit. He has published a series of text books for use in Christian schools. Some of his other major works are ‘Doctrine of Incarnation and Salvation’, ‘The Seven Sacraments’ (co-authored with Metropolitan Haksaka), ‘Yakoub III: Life and Apostolic Visit to Middle East and Latin America’, ‘Apostolic Visit of Yacoub III to North America’, ‘The Dove by Bar Ebraya, transalation from Syriac to Arabic, with footnotes and a foreword on the theme of monastic life’, ‘Mor Aphrem the Syrian’ (published by the Ministry of Information, Government of Iraq, in 1974 on the occasion of St. Aphrem’s Jubilee), ‘Mor Jacob of Edessa’ (633-708 AD), ‘Mor Dionysius Talmahari’ (ninth century), ‘Story of Seven Sleepers-a perspective from Syriac Sources’, ‘Syrian Orthodox Church through the Ages’, ‘Syriac literature in the sixth century’, ‘Bar Hibarius’. Among his important addresses includes “Syrian Orthodox Church and Ecumenical Movement”, “Position and Role of Women in the Church”, “Religious Virtues and Family Welfare”.

Additional charges as Metropolitan

As Metropolitan of Mosul the Holy Father took special interest in youth activities. Under him, the diocese flourished spiritually and materially. In 1967 he was given additional charge of the European Diocese. In 1969 he was transferred to the Archdiocese of Baghdad and Basra, perhaps the most prestigious archbishopric in the Middle East. In Baghdad he built churches and opened secondary schools and high schools. As in Mosul, in Baghdad also he took keen interest in the spiritual life of the youth.

Following the demise of H.E. Thimotheos Yacoub, Metropolitan Mor Severious Zakka was given the additional charge of the ancient monastery of St. Mathew (Mor Mattai Dayro) in Iraq. In 1976, he was appointed as the Metropolitan of Middle Europe and Scandinavian countries and in 1978 Mor Severios Zakka was given additional responsibility for the new diocese in Australia. He consecrated several churches and organized congregations in Melbourne, Sydney and a few other places.

On June 26, 1980, the Patriarch Mor Ya`qub III passed away and was entombed at the St. George Cathedral, Damascus. Consequent to this, the Episcopal Synod was called to choose the new successor to the Apostolic See. The Holy Synod held on July 11, 1980, with His Beatitude the Catholicos of the East Mor Baselios Paulose II in the chair, unanimously elected Mor Severios Zakka, Archbishop of Baghdad and Basra as the new Patriarch of Antioch and All the East. This marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the Church.

Patriarchal Enthronement

On September 14, 1980, Mor Severios was installed as the 122nd Patriarch of Antioch & all the East, by name IGNATIUS ZAKKA I, in a rite officiated by the late lamented Catholicos of the East Aboon Mor Baselios Paulose II, along with the archbishops of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church. It was for the first time in the history of the Universal Syrian Church that the chief celebrant for the Patriarchal enthronement was an Indian.

Since that blessed day, the Syrian Orthodox Church has witnessed a remarkable revival through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the pastoral care of H. H. Ignatius Zakka I Iwas. The 25 years of Mor Ignatius Zakka's Patriarchate have been eventful and significant. In his very first address after adorning the Patriarchate, he stressed the need for a major seminary and centre for the Church. This was a great dream of the new Patriarch. The Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate after moving from the Monastery of Mor Hananyo (Deir ez-Za`faran/Kurkumo Dayro) in Turkey, to Syria in the last century, lacked a proper centre in the new circumstances. It was the Holy fathers' vision that filled this gap. He acquired extensive lands, about 20 miles away from Old Damascus, where he built a magnificent Seminary with all facilities for theological students, accommodations for the visiting dignitaries, residence of the Patriarch etc.. Though officially, the Patriarchate still functions in the St. George Cathedral, Bab Touma, in the city of Damascus, His Holiness resides at the Mor Ephrem Seminary in Ma`arat Sayyidnaya, in the suburb of Damascus, Syria.

The Church which was in turmoil for a while because of persecution, is now witnessing a revival with establishment of churches and institutions in all parts of the world where the Syrian Christians has migrated. The largest congregation of the Church outside the Middle East and India is now situated at Germany where about 100,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians has settled. Similarly the Church has grown to other nations like Holland, Australia, USA, Canada and South America. And in all such countries, Monasteries, churches and other institutions have come up. Young bishops selected and ordained by the Holy father increased the pace of growth in all these places.

Despite his busy schedule, His Holiness has written many articles on a variety of subjects, in Syriac, Arabic and English. Selected articles and sermons of the Holy Father is to be published soon by the St. George Church, Chicago.

Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East offering Holy Qurbono

on 2nd April 2000 at the first church of Antioch, established by St. Peter in A.D.37

Another major achievement of the Holy Father is his close relationship with the other Churches and communities. The relationship with the Roman Catholic and the Byzantine Orthodox Churches were rewritten during his tenure. The Oriental Orthodox family came closer. From 1998, heads of the 3 Oriental Churches in Middle East - the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church (Catholicosate of Cilicia, Antelias, Lebanon) - meet regularly every year; two of such meetings were held at our Seminary in Ma`arat Sayyidnaya. Another meeting of the heads of Oriental Churches will soon meet in December again at the Mor Ephrem Seminary. For many decades, the Church is involved in the activities of the World Council of Churches in which both Episcopal and Non-Episcopal Churches are members. The Holy Father is now one of the honorary Presidents of the World Council.

The apostolic visits of His Holiness to India in 1982, 2002, 2004 and 2008, and to the various Archdioceses in the Middle East, Americas and Europe have been most successful. It was during the 2004 apostolic visit, the Holy father consecrated the new headquarters of the Church in India in co-operation with His Beatitude the Catholicos and the Metropolitans.

On July 26th 2002, His Holiness installed the then president of the Episcopal Synod of Indian Church, the 'CATHOLICOS' (Maphryono), with the name 'Baselios Thomas I'. This was a historic moment for the Church in India. The new Catholicos was consecrated as the successor to the late Mor Baselios Paulose II who led the patriarchal enthronement ceremony of His Holiness in 1980. Now the Holy Synod of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church consists of 59 prelates besides the Patriarch and the Catholicos, of which 35 prelates were ordained by our Patriarch Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka-I Iwas.

Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate

Bab Toma, P.O.Box 22260, Damascus, Syria

Tel. (963) 11 543-2401 / 543-5918

Fax (963) 11 543-2400

St. Aphrem Monastery,
Maaret Saidnaya,
Damascus, Syria.
Tel: (963) 11 595-1870

Biography of the Holy father prepared by

John Philip Kottapparambil, India - email: johnphilipsk@gmail.com

External Links:

1. PRIMATES OF THE UNIVERSAL SYRIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH - http://SyrianChurch.org

2. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PATRIARCHS OF ANTIOCH & ALL THE EAST - http://sor.cua.edu

3. Brochure compiled by V. REV. FR. BOUTROS TOUMA ISSA in honour of PATRIARCH MORAN MOR IGNATIUS ZAKKA I IWAS in Aug 2005

References:

1. http://www.soca.cjb.net

http://www.geocities.com/s_o_c_a1/HH002.htm

http://www.geocities.com/s_o_c_a1/

http://www.geocities.com/s_o_c_a2/

(Slide show on the H.H. Patriarch's Consecration Silver Jubilee, Presented by St. Ephraim Syrian Orthodox church of Antioch, Perth - Western Australia)

2. Dr. D Babu Paul, 'Veni Vidi Vici' (1982)

3. http://www.soku.org

4. Very Rev. P P Joseph Corepiscopo Pulikaparambil, Biography of H.H. Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East.

(New Delhi St. Peter's church Souvenir, 1995-96)

source: http://www.syrianchurch.org/PZakka/biography.htm

Nothing stops a bullet like a job

2009-03-06T13:43:00.000-05:00

St. Mary's has an employment program. We have computers in our community center where individuals can file their unemployment claims and weekly reports. They are also able to get help preparing their resumes, doing their job searches, and lots of other employment related activities. You can help us by volunteering to work with us or donate to the program.

Someone asked why we are doing this. In this time of crisis, we all need to come together to help our brothers and sisters. Our employment is not new for faith based groups. In this video, Father Gregory Boyle, an activist priest and founder of Jobs for a Future and Homeboy Industries, nationally recognized employment programs for at-risk and gang-involved youth, shares personal stories about kinship at the USC School of Social Work All School Day.

Remember what Father Boyle has said, "Nothing stops a bullet like a job." It is also true that nothing stops lossing a home like a job, and nothing puts food on the table of a hungry family like a job. Listen to Father Boyle then call us and tell us when you can volunteer your time; reach in our pocket and send us the funds we need to keep the doors open. Our employment program will not continue to work with your help. The telephone number at St. Mary's is 574-540-2048. Stop by. We are located at 1000 South Michigan Street, Plymouth, Indiana.

Ancilla College Donates Computers to St. Mary's Employment Program

2009-03-06T11:44:00.001-05:00

Ancilla College donated computers to St. Mary's employment program, Pictured with Father Theodosius is Dr. Ronald L. May the president of Ancilla College. Ancilla College is located in Donaldson, Indiana, about 10 minues from Plymouth where St. Mary the Protectress is located. Ancilla's donation will let more people used the computers at the church's community center to file their unemployment claims, weekly reports, do online job searches, and prepare their resumes. The community center will also help those with no or litte computers skills learn how to use the computers.

We invite you to visit Ancilla's web site. It is http:www.ancilla.edu.

2009-02-03T15:40:00.000-05:00

Who am I really when no one is around?

2009-01-27T14:24:00.001-05:00

Who am I reaaly when no one is around? Am I never good enough for family and friends? Am I good enough for God?

Discover Recovery! Life hurts, but God heals. We celebrate God's healing power in our lives through working the 12-Steps of recovery for life's hurts, hang-ups, habits, and addictions. We accept God's grace in solving our life problems. The program and classes at St. Mary's are Christian fellowship to grow in and to become strong. It is supportive, respectful, and confidential. St. Mary's is a place to learn and grow spiritually and find a turning point in your life. It is a safe haven and a caring community.

The program and classes are at St. Mary the Protectress Orthodox Community, 1000 South Michigan Street, Plymouth, Indiana. The times for the classes are: Sunday 2 pm; Tuesday 10 am; Tuesday 7 pm. There are also AA and NA meetings at the community.

All are welcome...those of faith and those without faith.

St. Mary's is a community for people who have given up on church. Our mission is to show all people the unconditional love and grace of Jesus without any reservations due to their lifestyle or religion, past or present. This love has no agenda behind it (Cor 13:5). This grace sets no time line or personal agenda or standard for spiritual growth (Rom 4:4-5) The idea is to be a part of people's lives because we truly care for them rather than to fulfill a religious duty; to walk with them through all their struggles as a part of their lives, not as a religious outsider. Religion is a false perception of holiness that focuses on law and kills the true message of Christ Jesus. Jesus loves you. Jesus heals you. We know He loves and heals us also. We have been just where you are today. Join us.

You can discover more about our programs by emailing us at monastery@synesius.com, or by calling the community at 574-540-2048.

Desert Father: A Journey in the Wilderness with Saint Anthony

2009-01-17T19:11:00.002-05:00

Anthony of Egypt, one of the great early saints, was an ascetic who, when Christianity was just another cult threatening the Roman way, spiritually and politically thumbed his nose at authority by retreating to the desert to live as a "society of one." Cowan personalizes Anthony's story, beginning at Anthony's monastery in the eastern Egyptian desert, which houses some of the world's earliest ascetic and mystical literature, and besides Anthony, he examines the saint's great biographer, Athanasius. In addition, Cowan recounts his own relations with Lazarus, who lives on Anthony's mountain and is referred to as the last anchorite. Lazarus helped Cowan better understand his own reasons for seeking desert solitude. As he unfolds his and Lazarus' story, Cowan places Anthony in the context of an ascetic history extending from the pre-Christian monks said to have inhabited caves by the Dead Sea to John Cassian, who introduced asceticism to Europe in the fifth century. Cowan's exposition of Christian spirituality as it was and could now be lived is wholly engrossing.

"Cowan's elegant meditation upon Christian asceticism is the perfect antidote to the consumerism and hedonism of modern culture. His search for wisdom in the Egyptian desert reminds us that another way of life, based upon love and self-sacrifice, is available to all who are willing to seek it out."—Philip Zaleski, editor of the Best American Spiritual Writing series and author of The Recollected Heart

New Year's Eve AA Meeting at St. Mary's

2008-12-21T16:19:00.000-05:00

Lost history of Christianity

2008-11-24T12:48:00.001-05:00

Since 2002, Penn State scholar Philip Jenkins has been describing in several books the changes and the faces of global Christianity for the 21st century, with membership growth and ecumenical power shifting to the Christians in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But his newest book, "The Lost History of Christianity," travels back nearly 1,500 years to a forgotten empire of Christian churches in the Middle East and Asia, co-existing with non-Christian regimes, but eventually falling prey to persecution and ethnic/racial cleansing.

"In modern times, Christianity is described as traditionally based in Europe and North America," says Jenkins, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities. "But Asia and the Middle East were home to some of the world's largest Christian communities and churches that possessed a vibrant, direct connection to the earliest Jesus movement of Syria and Palestine."

In his book, the Penn State religious studies and history researcher documents a vast network of the world's largest and most influential Christian churches that existed to the east of the Roman Empire. These churches and their leaders ruled the Middle East for centuries and became the chief administrators and academics in the new Muslim empire.

While most modern Westerners follow the church's expansion west through Greece and onto Rome, a greater number of believers had traveled east along the land routes through modern Iraq and Iran, building enduring churches. Iraq had substantial numbers of flourishing churches and monasteries, with significant scholarship and spirituality. Iraq served as a powerful cultural and spiritual heartland of Christianity in the late Middle Ages, as did France, Germany or Ireland.

Iraq and Syria housed two great transnational churches, the Nestorians and Jacobites, deemed heretical by the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. Today's Iraqi cities of Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and Tikrit, hometown of the late Saddam Hussein, existed then as thriving Christian centers several centuries after the coming of Islam.

Jenkins tells the story of Bishop Timothy, who became the patriarch of the Church of the East in the year 780 in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia, near Babylon. In terms of his prestige and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was more influential than the Western pope in Rome and equal to the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople. Perhaps a quarter of the world's Christians considered Timothy as their spiritual and political leader.

"Given the breadth of the empire, church leaders frequently engaged in dialogue with heads of other world religions, including Islam and Judaism, but also Buddhism, Daoism and Zoroastrianism," said the Penn State historian. "Most eastern Christians had lived under Muslim political power, largely flourishing although subject to legal disadvantages."

In addition, the major contributions of Eastern Christians to the scholarship of medieval Arab societies are not well known. Nestorian, Jacobite, Orthodox and other Christians preserved and translated the science, philosophy and medicine of the ancient world to centers such as Baghdad and Damascus.

"Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian and Coptic, which is not necessarily Muslim," Jenkins noted. "They were the Christian roots of the Arabic Golden Age."

The 12th and 13th centuries saw cultural renaissance in many lands, but around 1300, the axe fell brutally, according to the new book. The 14th century witnessed a crescendo of violence and discrimination, attacking Christians as traitors and terrorists and introducing a trend of religious and ethnic intolerance for global factors.

"The Mongol invasions terrified Muslims and others," Jenkins said. "There were also climate change factors as the world entered rapid period of cooling, bad harvests and shrinking trade routes. A frightened and impoverished world looked for scapegoats. For whatever reasons, Muslim regimes and mobs delivered near-fatal blow to weakened Christian communities."

With political pressures from hostile regimes, local residents often converted to non-Christian religions, mainly Muslim, Buddhist and Shinto, sometimes following their leaders or the growing population in their communities.

In one estimate, the number of Asian Christians fell from 21 million to 3.4 million between 1200 and 1500. The proportion of the world's Christians in Africa and Asia fell from 34 percent to just 6 percent.

"Few records or scholars survived to maintain the history of the Eastern churches. A brutal purge of Christianity, most spectacularly in Asia, left Europe as the geographical heart of the Christian faith and the only base for expansion," Jenkins said.

Today, the world may again face the prospect of social tension and religious violence as the effects of global climate change are being felt. Hostile regimes could pose pressures to growing Christian populations in south and east Asia as well.

"We can certainly draw lessons from mistakes that churches make that hasten their demise, but other lessons present themselves. Rather than asking why churches die, we should seek to know how they endure for so long in seemingly impossible circumstances," Jenkins said.

"The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia -- and How It Died," is published by HarperOne.
source: http://live.psu.edu/story/36227

The Monk Who Grew Prayer

2008-11-08T00:39:00.001-05:00

A monk prays deep in the forest. It looks like he is doing just simple, ordinary tasks, such as chopping wood and and tending to his garden. But as he works he is really growing prayer. The monk prays continually throughout the day and night, and, as the seasons pass, he becomes a holy man. This delightful, beautifully illustrated book teaches children that no matter what they are doing, or what hour of the day it is, they too, can pray.

Punk Monks

2008-11-08T00:22:00.002-05:00

Fleeing the compromises of the 4th century church, the Desert Fathers founded monasticism. In reaction to a Christianity they scarcely recognized, these radicals fled to the Egyptian desert to model a different, radical style of discipleship, filled with sacrifice and continual prayer. Who are the new monks, the new punks, the new revolutionaries? The answer lies in an upsurge of 24-7 monastic communities around the world. Punk Monk combines a narrative journey through the beginnings of 24-7 Prayer Boiler Rooms with a discussion on the roots of monasticism, particularly its ethos and values, and how it can be applied in the third millennium. Drawing influences from the Franciscans, the Celts and the Moravians, the book highlights the counter-cultural and revolutionary force of monasticism and asks whether it is time for a new monastic movement. It also takes punk as a contemporary expression of monastic spirit and asks whether a silent revolution is coming.

About the Author
PETE GREIG is one of the founding leaders of 24-7 Prayer and listed by Relevant Magazine as one of the top 50 Revolutionary Leaders of his generation. Greig is a popular speaker and the author of Red Moon Rising and God on Mute. He and his wife, Samie, and their two children reside in Chichester, England. ANDY FREEMAN is the Abbot of the first 24-7 Boiler Room, launched in Reading, UK. Andy now helps others to develop Boiler Rooms in their communities and works on 24-7 s International Team. www.24-7prayer.com

My Mother's Awesome Soup

2008-10-10T18:00:00.000-04:00

I keep telling people about my mother's great homemade soup. One of my grandsons calls it awesome soup. He's right it is. Mom makes it every week for everyone who comes to Sunday's service. And some times she makes a lot more than soup. you don't know what you are missing.

So join us at St. Mary the Protectress this Sunday or for any of our daily week day services. We are a praying and worshiping family. the prayer is awesome and so is the soup.

The picture below is my mother with our bishop, Mar CASSIAN, during his visit last month.

By the way the Divine Liturgy starts are 10:00 am followed by fellowship and awesome soup. Evening prayer on Saturdays is at 5:00 pm followed by Orthodox 101. For other service time call the church at (574) 540-2048.

Pictures of Our Church

2008-10-10T15:20:00.001-04:00

A couple of readers have written and asked what St. Mary the Protectress Church looks like. So I took my trusty camera out and took some pictures and here they are.

When Women Come First

2008-10-09T23:41:00.001-04:00

When Women Come First
With a subtle yet penetrating understanding of the intricate interplay of gender, race, and class, Sheba George examines an unusual immigration pattern to analyze what happens when women who migrate before men become the breadwinners in the family. Focusing on a group of female nurses who moved from India to the United States before their husbands, she shows that this story of economic mobility and professional achievement conceals underlying conditions of upheaval not only in the families and immigrant community but also in the sending community in India. This richly textured and impeccably researched study deftly illustrates the complex reconfigurations of gender and class relations concealed behind a quintessential American success story.
When Women Come First explains how men who lost social status in the immigration process attempted to reclaim ground by creating new roles for themselves in their church. Ironically, they were stigmatized by other upper class immigrants as men who needed to "play in the church" because the "nurses were the bosses" in their homes. At the same time, the nurses were stigmatized as lower class, sexually loose women with too much independence. George's absorbing story of how these women and men negotiate this complicated network provides a groundbreaking perspective on the shifting interactions of two nations and two cultures.

From the Inside Flap
"In this highly insightful and clearly written book, Sheba George gives us a portrait of immigration from two ends of the globe. She traces the experience of nurses from Kerala, India, who migrate to the United States while tracing, also, the challenges to notions of manhood faced by their follower-husbands-a challenge some resolve by elevating roles at church. She shows how notions of gender can thus ricochet from one institution to another. Original, important, and a very good read."--Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life and co-editor, with Barbara Ehrenreich of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy

"Beautifully written, When Women Come First sensitively exposes the emotional and psychic costs that are part and parcel of the immigrant pursuit of the American dream. It is an outstanding contribution to the burgeoning field of gender and migration."--Yen Le Espiritu, author of Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries

"With remarkable scope and vivid insight, Sheba George describes the daily lives of a community of Christian immigrants with continuing ties to Kerala, India. George's analysis of the immigrants' struggles around issues of gender and class links experiences at work, at home, and in the church. An important and engaging contribution to the literature on immigration, transnationalism, work, family, gender, and class."--Barrie Thorne, Professor of Sociology and Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley

"As countries like the United States move towards post-industrial, service-based economies, immigrant women are recruited for all sorts of jobs. In this timely study, Sheba George examines the case of immigrant nurses from India. With lively ethnography and astute theoretical insights, George's book complicates our understandings of the relations between migrant women's work and earnings to autonomy and power, and to the remaking of family, community, congregation and self. This is a powerful book, sure to inspire new questions and directions for the next generation of gender and migration research."--Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence

HOW AMERICAN POLITICS BECAME SECULARIZED

2008-10-09T08:12:00.001-04:00

HOW AMERICAN POLITICS BECAME SECULARIZED

An excerpt from the book Total Truth

by Nancy Pearcey

Throughout the Middle Ages, a constant tug-of-war was waged between church and state, between pope and emperor, with one gaining predominance for a period, then the other redressing the balance. An important turning point came after the Reformation. The split in the medieval church had fractured the religious unity of Christendom, yet both sides continued to hold a territorial view of the church. They simply assumed that everyone living within a certain nation or geographical region should belong to the same religion. As a result, for more than a hundred years, beginning in the late sixteenth century and continuing throughout most of the seventeenth century, Europe found itself embroiled in religious wars. Many people had to flee persecution in their homeland, becoming religious refugees.

How did a century of religious warfare affect people's attitudes toward morality and politics? When people saw that Christians were willing to shed blood over religious differences, they began searching for an alternative basis for the social order. They sought a purely secular arena of discourse, autonomous from religion, that would function as "neutral" territory to bring peace to warring religious factions. As Jeffrey Stout explains, many came to think they could "contain the violent effects of religious disagreement only by creating nonreligious means for discussing and deciding matters of public importance."

Up until this time, the state had been regarded as a moral and spiritual entity even though it was institutionally independent of the church. Ordained by God, its duty was to protect the "common good" of the body politic, conceived in moral terms like Justice, Mercy, and Righteousness (with the definitions of these terms ultimately derived from divine revelation). Rulers regarded themselves as mediating, or participating in, God's own righteous rule over the nations—which included the duty of protecting "true religion" and upholding the church.

After the Reformation, however, people began to ask, Which church? Then, after a hundred years of warfare between conflicting churches, many began to answer that the state should not have the job of upholding any church. They even began to contest the moral function of the state: Since morality is derived from religion, any religious conception of the "common good" that was proposed might well be challenged by a competing religion. No, a purely secular basis would have to be found.

The first rise to the challenge was Thomas Hobbes. He proposed that the ultimate basis for the political order was the fear of violent death. The "state of nature," as Hobbes pictured it, was hostile and violent―a war of all against all. The threat of death hangs over everything and (in his famous phrase) life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Each individual has a natural "right" to preserve his own life, taking whatever he needs, even if that means stealing or killing. The state arises when individuals decide that life would be more pleasant if they would give up certain rights, such as the right to defend themselves, and transfer those rights to a civil authority. This transferring of rights is called a contract, and for Hobbes it becomes the basis of all moral obligations.

The crucial point is that social duties no longer arise from a "common good" for civil society, constituted by transcendent principles such as Justice. Instead they are simply the product of individual choice—when people decide it is in their interests to contract away some of their own rights. This is a form of pre-Darwinian naturalism, where the foundation of civic society is not a higher good but merely the individual's biological urge for self-preservation.

John Locke presented a similar scenario, except that for him the ultimate source of the civil order is hunger. The most basic right is the right to eat, and the threat of death does not come from other people (as it did for Hobbes) but rather from hunger. By exerting his labor to find food, or to grow it himself, the individual creates private property―and to protect his property more effectively, he enters into a social contract with others. Now, Locke assigned a much more limited role to the state than either Hobbes or Rousseau did, which is why he became the favorite of political conservatives. Yet like the other social contract theorists, he did not base civil society on any higher good. Instead he portrayed it as the creation of individuals, motivated by enlightened self-interest. Locke's picture of society is atomistic, where all that exists ultimately are individuals and their needs or wants.

Rousseau derived civil society from the natural instinct of "self love" (amour de soi) or self-preservation. Thus for all the social contract theorists, the ultimate basis for the political order is purely secular. They based civil society not on moral ideals derived from religion but strictly on the natural, biological instinct of self-preservation. The sole source of political legitimacy is the consent of isolated, autonomous individuals.

Ironically, social contract theory presupposes a completely unrealistic conception of human nature. The atomistic creature that populates the state-of-nature scenario appears to be an independent, fully developed, autonomous individual. "The theory starts with an image of, say, a 21-year-old adult male," comments Christian political theorist Paul Marshall. Obviously, no one actually comes into the world that way. Each of us begins life as a dependent, helpless baby, born into a family and a complex social, religious, and civil order. Only through the love and sociality exercised toward us by others do we grow into mature, independent creatures. As Bertrand de Jouvenal once commented, social contract theories "are the views of childless men who must have forgotten their childhood." Biology and history both teach that humans are intrinsically social beings.

Yet, despite its unrealistic starting premise, social contract theory became the dominant political theory in America—while at the same time a powerful force for secularization. As we have seen, what united the various versions of social contract theories was their rejection of transcendent moral ideals, to be replaced by a lowest-common-denominator biological urge as the foundation of the political order. Religious perspectives were marginalized, while the state took over as the central institution in modern society.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that many evangelicals in the eighteenth and nineteenth century failed to recognize what was happening. Having embraced a two-story concept of truth, they assumed that political philosophy was a lower-story "science" that could be pursued apart from any distinctively Christian perspective. As a result, many evangelicals at the time simply adopted secular political philosophies—especially that of John Locke. Whatever Locke's personal religious faith was (which is endlessly debated), there can be no doubt that his political theory was at root secular, grounding civil society not in moral goods like Justice and Right but merely in individual self-interest.

How did evangelicals miss that? As George Marsden explains, "Locke's contract theory of government was, in practice, sufficiently like the Puritan concept of covenant that no one in the revolutionary era seems to have thought it significant to criticize its essentially secular theoretical base." By treating the lower story as philosophically neutral, Christians failed to recognize alien philosophies—and sometimes even adopted them without being unaware of it.

In our own day, this same secularization process explains why politics leaves so many people disillusioned and spiritually dissatisfied. "The liberalism of Hobbes and Locke is founded upon the relatively 'low' human goals of self-preservation and the desire for wealth," writes Stanley Kurtz—which accounts for "the chronic disenchantment at the heart of modernity." At the core, humans are moral beings, and we long to see our highest moral ideals expressed in our corporate life. Ultimately the secular version of civic life fails to satisfy the human longing to live together in moral communities, committed to Justice and Righteousness.

source: http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/archives/govpol/pearcey.php

The Jesus Prayer

2008-10-08T22:43:00.000-04:00

The Jesus Prayer

Fr. Peter-Michael Preble

God is calling each of us in special way into the desert. In this desert He wishes to reveal Himself in a powerful way beyond words and images, in the immediacy of a lover to His beloved."¹

Where is the desert to which the Holy One is calling us? Is it a physical place? Do we get there by airplane or bus? Can we walk there and find the Holy One sitting on a rock ready to teach us?

Not really. We find the desert in our own heart. The Holy One will take up residence there and teach us. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner," the prayer reads. These words can begin a new relationship with the Holy One -- deep and personal with Jesus Himself.

The primary text for the prayer is The Way of the Pilgrim. Set in pre-Revolutionary Russia, it is an autobiographical story of a Russian pilgrim who set out to discover what Saint Paul's admonition to "Pray without ceasing" meant.¹ The Pilgrim had a tough life. He lost everything dear to him.

As a child he lost the use of an arm by the hand of his brother. As an adult the same brother set fire to his home. The Pilgrim and his wife lived in great poverty. Not long after his wife died. Life seemed like it came to an end. He became a homeless wanderer -- a pilgrim -- taking only the Scriptures for comfort and consolation on his journeys.

The Pilgrim first heard the words, "Pray without ceasing" during the Divine Liturgy as he wandered. "A burning desire and thirst for knowledge" awoke within him he would write later.³ He set out to find someone to teach him more and encountered a monk who introduced him to the Jesus Prayer.

Prayer is a journey of its own, a pathway to God. But there is more than one way to pray. Theophan the Recluse proposed that three degrees of prayer exist:

Oral or bodily prayer
Prayer of the mind
Prayer of the heart (or: "of the mind and heart"): spiritual prayer

St. Theophan explained the threefold distinction this way:

You must pray not only with words but with the mind, and not only with the mind but with the heart, so that the mind understands and sees clearly what is said in words, and the heart feels what the mind is thinking. All these combined together constitute real prayer, and if any of them is absent your prayer is either not perfect, or it is not prayer at all.⁴

The first of these types of prayer, oral or bodily, is the prayer that Orthodox should be the most familiar with, the prayer of the lips and tongue. It that consists in reading or reciting certain words. If prayer is to effective and more than reciting sentences however, it is essential to concentrate inwardly on the meaning of the words. As prayer grows more interior - more inward, the outward oral recitation becomes less important.

The Jesus Prayer is usually said in this way: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me." The words "a sinner" may be added at the end, or the prayer may be said in the plural, "have mercy upon us." Other variations also exist. Some people use a prayer rope to help them pray. This prayer rope differs from the one used in the west. Normally it is a knotted cord of wool or other material. Unlike a string of beads, the prayer rope is silent.

Each part of the rope has a symbolic meaning. Black is the color of mourning and sorrow and this reminds us to be sober and serious in our lives. It is made of knotted wool that recalls the Christ the Good Shepherd, and Christ the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The cross hanging on the end of the rope speaks of Christ's death and resurrection. Some prayer ropes have tassels on the end of the cross.

The tassel is used to wipe the tears of repentance away from our eyes, or if you have no tears, to remind you to weep because you can not weep.

The story is told of a monk who decided to make knots in a rope which he could use in caring out his daily rule of prayer. But the devil would untie the knots he made in the rope, frustrating the poor monks efforts. Then an angel appeared and taught the monk a special kind of knot that consists of a series of inter locked crosses, and this knot the devil was not to unravel.

This Jesus Prayer is just one of the many different paths to interior prayer. In order to persevere in this form of prayer, we must first be grounded in general prayer. Unceasing prayer is a difficult path to follow and one of the most challenging ways of praying The Jesus Prayer must be rooted in the simplicity of a life grounded in the Gospels.

The Jesus Prayer focuses on repentance and the healing of the soul. The Russian monk Macarius of Optino remarked: "In order that men may recognize their spiritual sores, they require...bitter sorrows; all of which purifies the heart and restores health to the stricken soul."⁵ In another place Macarius spoke about the self-sufficient and self-righteous sinner: "Mark this too: it is not very hard for the simple sinner to come to hate his foul life and, leaving it, to fling himself on the mercy of God; but it is very hard for the subtler sinner -- the self-sufficient one -- to let the ray of Divine Love pierce the leather jacket of self-righteousness."⁶ In its initial stage of use then, the Jesus Prayer is essentially a penitential prayer. The Jesus Prayer is the prayer of one who is on his way home - just like the prodigal son.

The second part of the prayer consists in the simple invocation of the Divine Name: "Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God...." The tradition teaches that this invocation of the Name will slowly permeate our entire being, leading us to inner silence. The Jesus Prayer teaches reveals that inner silence as is our fundamental and original state of being. It makes the holiness of God bearable for man.

According to Theophan the Recluse: "When beginning to pray, start always as if you never prayed properly before"⁷ and "The essential and indispensable part of prayer is attention -- without attention there is no prayer."⁸ "Let there be no studied elegance in the words of your prayer," John Climacus taught: "…do not launch out into long discourses that fitter away your mind in efforts for eloquence. One word alone spoken by the Publican touched God's mercy; a single word full of faith saved the Good Thief. Many words in prayer often fill the mind with images and distract it, while often one single word draws it into recollection."⁹

In The Way if the Pilgrim, the pilgrim is told to say the Jesus Prayer slowly, gently, and quietly. Each word is to be said without haste. While praying the Jesus Prayer, we may become aware that there is a deeper way of speaking to God than we ordinarily assumed. Prayer moves from exterior recitation to an inward expression.

Persons accomplished in the Jesus Prayer report that as their prayers move ever inward, the awareness grows that the body is indeed the "temple of the Holy Spirit" as St. Paul taught. The Holy Spirit does indeed dwell within us. This "prayer of the heart" corresponds to the biblical understanding that the heart is the seat of understanding. "Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it springs the issues of life" (Proverbs 4:23).

Spiritual masters of many religions refer to the heart as the seat of wisdom.

Theophan observed: "If the heart is the center of the human person, then it is by the heart that man enters into relation with all that exists." Later on he added: "There is a particular way that leads to harmony among men that is the heart."¹¹ Moving to prayer St. Theophan insisted: "You must descend from your head into your heart. At present your thoughts of God are in your head. And God Himself is, as it were, outside you, and so your prayer and other spiritual exercises remain exterior. While you are still in your head, thoughts will...always be whirling about like snow in winter or clouds of mosquitoes in the summer."¹²

This prayer has been practiced by Orthodox Christians for generations and should be part of our everyday spirituality. Begin in desert, and meet the Holy One there. Ask Him to teach you His prayer and then begin slowly to pray.

"Once we have moved from multiplicity to oneness, and once we have been plunged into the center of Love, suffering thus the Divine Light, then our entire attention will be drawn to the Holy One."¹³

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Notes

Prayer of Jesus, Prayer of the Heart. (Greenwood, IN: Inner Life Publications, 1996)
The Way of the Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, trans from the Russian by R.M. French (New York: The Seabury Press, 1965)
1 Thessalonians 5:17 NRSV
The Way of the Pilgrim
The Art of Prayer, an Orthodox Anthology, trans. E.M. Palmer (London, Faber & Faber, 1966)
Marcarius, Staretz of Optino, Russian Letters of Direction 1834 - 1860, selection, translation, and forward by I. de Beausobre (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975)
bid.
An Orthodox Anthology of Prayer
Ibid.
J. Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, trans. A. Fiske (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974)
1 Corinthian 6:19
Winkler, Gabriel. The Jesus Prayer in Eastern Spirituality (Light & Life Publishing, Minneapolis, 1986)
Ibid.
Ibid.

The Rev. Fr. Peter-Michael Preble is Pastor of St. Michael Orthodox Christian Church in Southbridge, Massachusetts and edits the blog Monasticism.

Article link: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles8/Preble-The-Jesus-Prayer.php

Theology of a Classless Society

2008-09-28T12:20:00.000-04:00

An Indian Orthodox bishop looks at society. It is an important work and good read. While there are no new copies available, there are several used copies in excellent condition. Don't miss this one.

Inner Way Toward a Rebirth of Eastern Spiritual Direction

2008-09-24T18:33:00.001-04:00

Inner Way is a call to reawaken the critical ministry of spiritual direction in which a person, whether in a life crisis or merely seeking Christian growth, can make spiritual gains. The author, an Orthodox Christian priest, writes from within the tradition which gave birth to the practice of spiritual direction. As such, Fr. Allen's book is a view "from the inside," reflecting both theory and practice. The study's central focus is the exploration of spiritual direction as a ministry of the Eastern Church in dialogue with anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Fr. Allen provides a needed resource for all Christians - and especially counselors, spiritual guides, and pastors - who seek to traverse the inner way.

Soul Mending

2008-09-24T18:31:00.000-04:00

A series of essays on the nature and experience of spiritual direction and pastoral care in the Orthodox Tradition. Also includes excerpts from patristic sources on the topic.

About the Author
Fr. John Chryssavgis is Professor of Theology at Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the author of Love, Sexuality and the Sacrament of Marriage; The Way of the Fathers; and Beyond the Shattered Image: Orthodox Perspectives on the Environment.

Elder Zosima

2008-09-24T18:28:00.000-04:00

Elder Zosima (1767-1833) was one of the many holy hermits and desert dwellers that lived in the vast and wild forests of the Russian North. His biography reveals how the grace of God works in one who is devoted to the labor of unceasing noetic activity--unseen warfare and interior silence. Hesychasm is the mental activity of the Jesus Prayer, in the depths of the human heart. Through it the whole man is enlightened and sanctified. Written by the Elder's niece and spiritual daughter, ELDER ZOSIMA: HESYCHAST OF SIBERIA touchingly and expressively recounts the life of this holy contemporary of St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. Herman of Alaska, as well as his loving spiritual relationship with his elder and co-mystic, Elder Basilisk, a great doer of the Jesus Prayer.

Shephard of Souls

2008-09-24T18:26:00.000-04:00

At Sihastria Monastery in the mountains of northern Romania, Elder Cleopa tended the sheep for many years, spending his days in prayer and spiritual contemplation. Then, at the age of twenty-nine, he was unexpectedly chosen to be the new Superior of the monastery.

Now that he was a shepherd of souls, Elder Cleopa quickly revealed his skill in directing people in the spiritual life. He instructed both monastics and lay people in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, and in the cultivation of hesychia (interior silence).

After being arrested and threatened by the communist secret police, Elder Cleopa departed to the wilderness, where he spent a total of ten years in unceasing prayer. Eventually he returned for good to Sihastria Monastery. Each day for the next thirty years, hundreds of people flocked to him for guidance. Endowed by God with spiritual insight, he would mystically apprehend the problems and needs of each, leading them into closer communion with their Creator. At the time of his death in 1998, he was the spirtual father of all Romania.

This inspiring book by the Elder's close disciple contains both his life and counsels.

Christ, The Alpha and Omega

2008-09-24T18:23:00.000-04:00

The Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America is pleased to announce the publication of an outstanding book by Bishop Athanasius Yevtich, a disciple of the great twentieth-century theologian Archimandrite Justin Popovich. Bishop Athanasius"'" thought combines adherence to the teachings of the Church Fathers with a vibrant faith and a profound experience of Christ in the Church. Christ The Alpha and Omega is the first of a planned collection of works of contemporary Serbian theologians. It is an anthology of Bishop Athanasius"'" articles which have appeared in Serbian, Greek, French, English and Russian. Focusing on themes central to Christian patristic Triadology, Ecclesiology and Anthropology, the book reveals the ultimate purpose of man and the universe, and speaks of how each of us can realize this purpose within the divine-human community of the Orthodox Church. Bishop Athanasius reminds us that the God-man Jesus Christ is the Beginning and the End of all things, and that we must seek our own end, goal, and fulfillment in Him. The book is adorned with striking illustrations by Fr. Stamatis Skliris, a parish priest in Athens who is renowned as an iconographer and as a writer and lecturer on Byzantine iconography.

Order your copy now. There are only two left in stock, until a new shippment arrives.

North Star - St. Herman of Alaska

2008-09-22T18:21:00.000-04:00

This is a wonderful book for children and adults alike. Younger children may find it difficult to make it through the whole story. Older children and adults will love the beautiful (and colorful) illustrations. This book brings to life the life of St. Herman of Alaska.

To cross the Bering Strait and spread the word of Christianity - that's what a small group of Russian missionaries set out to do. "North Star: St Herman of Alaska" is the powerful story of Father Herman, the only one who survived the strenuous journey. He lived with the Aleut people for over forty years, gaining and imparting much wisdom. Featuring beautiful illustrations, "North Star" is a moving tale, highly recommended for community library picturebook collections.

Orthodox Alaska

2008-09-22T18:17:00.001-04:00

In 1794, the first Orthodox missionary monks arrived at Kodiak to fond what they believed would be an indigenous Orthodox Church in the New World. They recognized as integral to their mission the defense of Native people who were being abused, exploited and enslaved by an unjust regime. The mission understood its function in cosmic terms: to sanctify, here and now, this land, these people, and bring them to the unity-in-love which is the goal of authentic Christian mission.

The history of the Alaskan Church confirms the eternal and indestructible character of the Church's vision, integrating into her worship the cosmic, scriptural and eschatological dimension of faith. Among the Native Americans in Alaska, Orthodoxy has become an integral part of an authentically American culture. Consequently it is appropriate that an Orthodox theology of mission should originate from the Alaskan context. If an American Orthodox missiology is to emerge, its formulation should serve not only the Church in America but contribute to the clarification of Orthodox theology for the universal Church as well.

Archpriest Michael J. Oleska, Alaskan Orthodox missionary for nearly three decades, completed his doctoral work in Church History and Patristics at the Orthodox Theological Faculty in Presov, Slovakia, in 1988. Upon completing a year of research and teaching at Moscow's St Patriarch Tikhon Theological Institute, he was elected Dean of St Herman's Seminary in Kodiak, Alaska, in 1996. He is also the editor of Alaskan Missionary Spirituality.

Mixed Blood Not Mixed Up: Finding God-given Identity in a Multi-cultural World

2008-09-22T18:15:00.001-04:00

Mixed Blood Not Mixed Up: Finding God-given Identity in a Multi-cultural World

Racism...Multi-culturalism...Unity in Diversity...
Reconciliation...Revival...And the Church...no problem right?
Think again...

This is an intimate and revealing story about how God is using Randy Woodley, a mixed-blood Cherokee Indian, and other Native Americans, to reveal God-given, Biblical answers to some of the most challenging dilemmas of our time!

"This is an important book, written by one of the most trusted, wise, and faithful Native American leaders of our generation...a readable adventure that touched my heart."
John Dawson, Founder, International Reconciliation Coalition

Randy Woodley has given us some powerful Biblical insights that teach us not only how to appreciate our differences as people of many cultures, but to actually find the capacity to love one another in the midst of our differences.
Richard Twiss (Lakota), President, Wiconi International

"Mixed Blood Not Mixed Up calls us all, of whatever race, denomination or political persuasion, to learn to live in Jesus' love for one another... I highly recommend not only reading but enlisting and doing."
John Loren Sanford (Osage), Founder, Elijah House

Living in Color: Embracing God's Passion for Diversity

2008-09-22T18:13:00.001-04:00

Living in Color: Embracing God's Passion for Diversity

What is your picture of heaven?

The picture given in Revelation shows a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language, all worshipping God together. But the picture of worship on earth is not nearly so diverse.

Living in Color exposes the history of racism and ethnocentricity that afflicts our nations and churches today. A Keetoowah Cherokee, Randy Woodley provides fascinating insight into Native American culture and a biblical model for racial reconciliation and healing of all people. Above all, this book celebrates God's beautiful plan to reveal Himself through every unique individual, family and culture.

"An excellent book. Written by one of the most trusted, wise and fruitful Native American leaders of our generation . . . . It is time to listen."

-from the foreword by John Dawson, author, Healing America's Wounds

"I endorse this book wholeheartedly."
-John Perkins, founder, John Perkins Foundation

"This is perhaps the most important book any American citizen could read who wants to truly understand global missions."
-Ralph D. Winter, founder, U.S. Center for World Missions

"A powerful, honest Native American voice articulating a multicultural, contextualized, thoroughly biblical Gospel."
-Ronald J. Sider, president, Evangelicals for Social Action

"What Randy teaches is vital if we are to reveal Jesus to the hungry."
-John and Paula Sandford, co-founders, Elijah House

About the Author
Randy Woodley, M.Div., a Keetoowah Cherokee, and his wife, Edith, an Eastern Shoshone, founded Eagle's Wings Ministry, a culturally contextual ministry among Native Americans. The Woodleys have four children and live in Hayden, Alabama.

Banker to the Poor

2008-09-20T15:37:00.001-04:00

It began with a simple $27 loan. After witnessing the cycle of poverty that kept many poor women enslaved to high-interest loan sharks in Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus lent money to 42 women so they could purchase bamboo to make and sell stools. In a short time, the women were able to repay the loans while continuing to support themselves and their families. With that initial eye-opening success, the seeds of the Grameen Bank, and the concept of microcredit, were planted.

After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Yunus returned to Bangladesh to settle into a life as a professor. But a famine in 1974 ravaged the country, leading Dr. Yunus to alter his thinking and his life profoundly: "What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?.... Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me." Armed with little more than a lofty dream to end the suffering around him, he started an experimental microcredit enterprise in 1977; by 1983 the Grameen Bank was officially formed.

The idea behind the Grameen Bank is ingeniously simple: extend credit to poor people and they will help themselves. This concept strikes at the root of poverty by specifically targeting the poorest of the poor, providing small loans (usually less than $300) to those unable to obtain credit from traditional banks. At Grameen, loans are administered to groups of five people, with only two receiving their money up front. As soon as these two make a few regular payments, loans are gradually extended to the rest of the group. In this way, the program builds a sense of community as well as individual self-reliance. Most of the Grameen Bank's loans are to women, and since its inception, there has been an astonishing loan repayment rate of over 98 percent.

Banker to the Poor is an inspiring memoir of the birth of microcredit, written in a conversational tone that makes it both moving and enjoyable to read. The Grameen Bank is now a $2.5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal. Ever optimistic, Yunus travels the globe spreading the belief that poverty can be eliminated: "...the poor, once economically empowered, are the most determined fighters in the battle to solve the population problem; end illiteracy; and live healthier, better lives. When policy makers finally realize that the poor are their partners, rather than bystanders or enemies, we will progress much faster that we do today." Dr. Yunus's efforts prove that hope is a global currency. --Shawn Carkonen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Bangladesh, a country the size of Florida with a population of over 120 million people, is the home of Grameen Bank, the inspiration of economist Yunus, Bangladesh-born and U.S.-trained. Instead of spending his life as a university economics professor, Yunus decided in the mid-1970s to develop a micro-lending program to help the poorest people of his country. Yunus based the program on his strong belief that the very poor do not need complicated training programs to improve their economic lot. They need money, in the form of loans. This program has empowered thousands of peopleAmany of them womenAand surprised experts in economic development who never believed that the very poor would find the initiative and ability to repay even the smallest ($25-$500) loans. Grameen ("of the village") Bank has developed into an internationally acclaimed and replicated method for assisting the impoverished in Malaysia, the Philippines, Nepal, and even the United States. Definitely recommended for larger public and academic libraries.AOlga B. Wise, Compaq Computers, Austin
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Brewing Justice

2008-09-20T15:35:00.001-04:00

Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.

From the Inside Flap
"The idea of fair trade in a global economy is central to contemporary debates over neoliberalism, globalization and the rule of the free market. But what are the coordinates of the fair trade moment; what sort of alternative does it offer for producers and consumers? Daniel Jaffee is at once a fierce proponent of fair trade but also a critical voice. How, he asks, can fair trade coffee be in and against the market? With one foot in the Central American coffee fincas and the other in the intellectual world of Karl Polanyi and his disciples, Daniel Jaffee has on offer a very heady brew. Brewing Justice is a pioneering study of the variety of fair trade movements; a prospectus for a more radical vision of fair trade--an alternative sort of market; and a vital contribution to contemporary debates over free trade, the global agro-food system and the so-called 'movement of movements'. A tour de force."--Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

"Daniel Jaffee has done the Fair Trade movement a real service in his meticulous research into the actual effect of Fair Trade on coffee farmers in a group of villages in Oaxaca, Mexico. Up till now the claims of Fair Trade benefits for the producers have been largely based on brief visits and anecdotes, but now there is hard evidence. In analysing the market for Fair Trade he distinguishes clearly between those who wish to break the market, those who would reform the market and those who simply want access to a growing market. But his book will be of great value not only in his conclusions about how Fair Trade can be made fairer, but in extending our understanding of the overwhelming power of the giant corporations in international trade, even seeking to improve their image by cooptation and dilution of the standards when faced by the challenge of Fair Trade." --Michael Barratt Brown, author of Fair Trade: Reform and Realities in the International Trading System

"It is possible to establish a global economy that is just, humane, and sustainable. But it will not be easy. The forces favoring injustice, inhumanity, and exploitation are powerful and entrenched. And, for too long, they have been supported by academics and researchers who have not bothered to examine the real costs of globalization on a standard free-trade model, let alone the real opportunities of globalization on an enlightened fair-trade model. Daniel Jaffee breaks new ground with Brewing Justice. His scholarship is stellar. His conclusions are at once realistic and inspiring. In these pages, it is possible to find the roadmap to a new and better global economy. Read them closely, embrace them, and then get to work on building a fair-trade future."--John Nichols, The Nation

"Brewing Justice is an impressive account of the relationships and ethics embedded in fair trade coffee. Engaging the reader in a comparative global ethnography of fair and free trade coffee production, the author evaluates the gains and losses of fair trade for Mexican peasants. Jaffee's unique accomplishment is to show the consuming public how fair trade can be realized through improving the tenuous existence of producers."--Philip McMichael, author of Development and Social Change

"Brewing Justice is at once a sobering account of what the fair trade movement has achieved, and an optimistic statement that only by deepening movements like this one, will society advance in the direction of economic democracy and justice."--Gerardo Otero, professor of sociology and Latin American Studies, Simon Fraser University

"Brewing Justice is not just a study of fair trade coffee. It also provides alternatives to the unfair rules of trade imposed by the WTO. And it shows that we can all play a role in shaping the economy. Drinking coffee is a political act."--Vandana Shiva, author of Earth Democracy

Fair Trade Bag

2008-09-20T15:32:00.001-04:00

Product Features

Hippy Chic Fair Trade reusable shopping bag made from locally grown and woven cotton.
The pattern is made by hand-block printing with 100% natural dyes.
Inside are words to remember - Fair Trade = Justice + Peace + Love!
hese bags are really cute, practical, eco-friendly and fair trade. Assorted colors.15 in. x 18 in.
Fair Trade allows artisans a fair wage to support their families.

Fair Trade Coffee

2008-09-20T15:21:00.001-04:00

Fair Trade Coffee? Don't know what it is?

Growing Fair Trade Coffee

CRS works to help coffee cooperatives inBolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Uganda and Viet Nam to transform their communities by growing great coffee, farming in ecologically responsible ways, and building relationships with Fair Trade coffee companies in the United States.

Drinking Fair Trade Coffee

Here in the United States, CRS partners with more than a dozen coffee companies that are totally committed to the principles of Fair Trade, including fair pricing and direct, long-term, mutually respectful trading relationships with the farmers who grow their coffee. These companies are also committed to CRS – every one donates a percentage of your purchase to theCRS Fair Trade Fundto help expand the Fair Trade model. So when youpurchase Fair Trade coffee from one of our partners, you are not just buying great coffee. You are helping to build a better trading system and a more just world, one cup at a time.

Finding Coffee that is Fair to Farmers

The U.S. coffee market can be confusing with all the labels floating around out there: Fair Trade, Bird-Friendly, Shade Grown, and Organic. With so many seals making claims about social and environmental responsibility, even the most informed consumer can get confused. CRS Fair Trade provides a side-by-side comparison of the logos on your coffee, and tells you what each one really does for farmers and the environment.

Read more about Fair Trade at the following:

http://www.crsfairtrade.org/

Orthodox Sweatshirt

2008-09-19T15:16:00.001-04:00

This is a great sweatshirt. Great gift. All TopExpressions products are made under strict quality controls. 100% cotton, weight aprox 25oz.

Not Coptic Orthodox? No problem! Visit on the over picture link and then search. There are also shirt, hats, and lots of other neat stuff.

The History of Orthodox Christianity

2008-09-19T15:07:00.001-04:00

_The History of Orthodox Christianity_ (2006) is a fascinating documentary that reveals the history of the Orthodox Church from the time of Christ to the modern day. As a Roman Catholic, I can truthfully say that this documentary helped me immensely to understand and appreciate the traditions of my Orthodox brothers and sisters. The documentary includes many beautiful images of the church in its development throughout the ages. Further, the documentary features commentary from learned scholars, patriarchs, and priests demonstrating their knowledge of the traditions of Christian Orthodoxy. Much of this material will certainly aid one's historical understanding to put the church into its proper historical context. The documentary makes a strong case for Christian Orthodoxy (and Christianity in general) showing the rise and development of the Orthodox churches. Further, the documentary discusses issues in more recent times, including the ecumenical movement among certain of the Orthodox and some of the difficulties it has encountered. I believe this movement offers great hope for Christianity in general.

The film includes the following three parts:

Part 1: The Beginnings - including discussion of Church and State, the Ecumenical Councils, the Nicene Creed, Icons and Iconoclasm, the Fathers of the Church, Monasticism (seen as an alternative to martyrdom in an era with less persecution), the splendor of Hagia Sophia, the mission to the Slavs, the Great Schism, the Crusades, and the Fall of Byzantium. This first part makes a good case for Orthodoxy as an unbroken tradition dating back to the time of Christ and St. Paul. It also shows the political development of the church as it became a potent force in the Roman empire at the time of Constantine the Great (regarded as a saint in the Orthodox churches) who after encountering a sign in the sky became a convert to Christ.

Part 2: Byzantium - including discussion of the Early Church, from Jerusalem to the Nations, Christianity and Hellenism (mentioning the vast resources of the ancient Greek culture and their contributions to the rise and development of Christianity), the Catacombs and the persecution, the early martyrs, the administrative structure of the church, and the birth of Byzantium and the legalization of the church. This part of the film makes a profound case for Constantine the Great who moved the capital of his empire to Byzantium where he resided in Constantinople (which is often referred to as "The Second Rome").

Part 3: Hidden Treasure - including discussion of the Church in Captivity, Moscow as the "Third Rome", the Greek revolution, the ancient Patriarchates today, the New World, Russia after Communism (and the damage done by Communism including persecution of the churches), challenges for the future (noting the ecumenical movement, the conflicts with Roman Catholicism, and the Uniate churches), and the essence of the Church (explaining how the church has developed following the Industrial Revolution and remains a "hidden treasure"). This part makes a profound case for the Orthodox Church as a hidden treasure and for each human being as made in the divine image and thus a treasure unto themselves. Further, this part discusses some of the ecumenical movements which offer much hope for the future, including relations between the various churches and with Roman Catholicism as well as with the Islamic world.

This film offers an excellent introduction and history of Orthodox Christianity. It is certain to be appreciated by those who admire the Orthodox churches and their great and noble traditions and contributions. Further, it makes a profound case for Orthodoxy and offers hope for the future for all mankind. Highly recommended!

Into Great Silence

2008-09-19T15:02:00.001-04:00

Zeitgeist Films presents a documentary directed and written by Philip Groning. In French and Latin with English subtitles. Filmmaker Philip Groning spent six months living among the monks of the Grand Chartreuse Charterhouse in the French Alps for his documentary "Into Great Silence." The filmmaker was granted unprecedented permission to film in 2002. This was not given lightly, for his request was put forth to the prior sixteen years earlier.

This is cinema at its purest and most exalted. It is hard to place into words a film, which is wrought in silence. For 162-minutes you will be allowed a glimpse of the ascetic strictness of the monks. I do not see this as a documentary, but an immersion into an entire way of life that will have no voiceovers or explanations. Just a small part of our time spent in transcendent meditation on the human pursuit of meaning, on man as a religious and social creature, on the form and function of symbols, ritual and traditions. And on the rhythms of work and prayer, night and day, winter and spring.

It is a beautiful film where everyone will take away something different and hopefully fulfilling. The film will not allow you to enter the world of the monks, but to just view it from the outside. You will see the day-to-day activities from season to season and be able to form your own opinions and conclusions. Many may at first experience impatience at the repetitions and variations encountered, but allow yourself time to adjust to the contemplative pace. And be witness to the ordinary moments that taken together are a representation of grace.

The Carthusian monks who are the subjects of this documentary do not have a great deal to say. Living in a light-filled stone charterhouse in a picturesque valley in the French Alps, they bind themselves to a vow not of literal silence but of extreme reticence. We view the daily lives, prayers and routines of this most ascetic of Catholic Orders founded in 1084 by Saint Bruno. The monks, because of their vow of poverty, subsist on very little. They pray aloud at times and sing solemn Gregorian chants, but they rarely speak, except on there Monday walks.

The monks in their rigor and discipline find their freedom and fulfillment. Your view on the monastery and our world will change as the movie progresses. And isn't that what a good movie or book is suppose to accomplish? It is a world of yesteryear as it existed one thousand years ago, where some modern technology has crept in, as you will see. In our modern world of moral decay this gives us a window to a traditional Catholic existence. A two thousand year tradition of following the Desert Fathers into a way of life that is rarely, if ever, seen.

I feel that this film is about the presence of God, a God who is there for those who seek Him with their whole hearts. In the film only a blind monk offers some simple but piercing observations on Christian happiness, abandonment to God's providential care, and the tragedy of the loss of faith and meaning in the modern world.

The Titles of Christ

2008-09-17T12:26:00.002-04:00

Orthodox Prayer Life

2008-09-17T12:22:00.002-04:00

Fathers guide to contemplative life,

January 3, 2004

By	Didaskalex "Eusebius Alexandrinus" (Kellia on Calvary, Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews

Wade in the River

2008-09-17T12:20:00.002-04:00

Book Description
"Wade in the River" is a fresh approach to the faith of Africa and its contribution to the world. Starting with the Biblical accounts of significant Africans, then passing through early Christianity, winding through the Islamic period, pressing past Western slavery, and finally arriving at the present era, the book describes the riches of ancient, African Christianity. This book fills an important gap in the need for people from all ethnic backgrounds to rethink the idea that "Christianity is a white man's religion."

About the Author
Father Paisius Altschul is the Director of Reconciliation Ministries, an inner city outreach to the poor and pastor of St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox Church in Kansas City, Missouri.

Unbroken Circle

2008-09-17T12:17:00.001-04:00

"An Unbroken Circle" introduces the historical and theological connections between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and African American Christianity. It weaves together the history of ancient African Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, and slave religion into a tapestry that might be surprising to some, and should be beneficial to all. The book demonstrates, conclusively, the common world view, theological perspective, and spiritual practices of African American Christians during slavery and Orthodox Christians throughout history.

This collection of essays is priceless and should be read by all Orthodox Christians. It has always been embarassing to see the lack of African Americans embracing the Orthodox Church and now with this book out we see that the problem is not with a historical leaning to Islam. African Americans are a huge population in America that have never even heard the least about Orthodoxy. This has got to change. Getting this book is a good start. It lays down the history of Christianity in Africa. It shows that some of the slaves were truly saints and marytrs. The book gives examples of true role models for blacks very much unlike the ones out today such as 50 Cent. Our culture has done so much harm to the blacks of this country and by and large we have done little to stop it. The chapter on resentment made me look at race relations in a whole new way. Buy this book. Buy more than one and give it to your African American friends especially.