August 14, 2018 Venerating Icons and Worshipping Idols: What Is The Difference? Since the beginning of Christianity, its critics saw it as a spin-off of earlier pagan cults because some elements of Christian worship appeared to…
August 13, 2018 St. Benjamin of Petrograd, a New Martyr and the Enemy of the Communist Authorities Today the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of one of the early stars in the pleiades of new martyrs and confessors of the…
August 12, 2018 About the Usage of Communion Spoons in Orthodox Tradition In the Orthodox Church, Holy Communion is administered to communicants using a special spoon. Some have asked, doesn’t the 101st canon of the Council…
August 12, 2018 Practical Advice on How to Avoid Lust In the Orthodox Church, there is a battle chest available, providing us with practical ways to resist sin and to actually defeat it. We…
August 10, 2018 Parable of the Day: Why to Waste Time with Prayer? A fisherman was ferrying a man across the river in his boat. The passenger was in a hurry and screamed, “Come on! I’m late…
August 10, 2018 Three Rhetorical Questions about Divine Liturgy I sometimes cannot help asking myself three liturgical questions whenever I visit churches which serve the Liturgy in the “classic” pattern I learned in…
August 9, 2018 How to Understand You Are Pure Enough A woman was reading the Book of Malachi: When she was reading Chapter 3, she was puzzled by verse 3, “And he shall sit…
August 9, 2018 A Personal Story about the Miraculous Help of St. Herman of Alaska Some time ago, in the 1990s, our parish invited a local “tree surgeon,” Leo M., to cut down a couple of dead trees in…
August 8, 2018 Parable of the Day: You Have to Live Here and Now! There was a carpenter — and a good carpenter he was, indeed — who liked to put everything off until a later time. As…
August 8, 2018 “Every Christian Is an Icon Painter!” We haven’t heard about iconoclasm for many centuries now. Icons are no longer destroyed, like they were in the 8th and early 9th century….
August 8, 2018 The Fall of the Devil: Is It an Orthodox Belief? A friend wrote: “My kids want to know where we got the story of the fall of the devil… How he was originally an…
August 7, 2018 Parable of the Day: How Is Love Supposed to Unite Us? Here is a parable passed on to us by the Holy Fathers. Imagine a circle on the floor. In the middle of this circle…
