Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Forgetfulness: the curse of human nature

...see, I pray you, after such signs had been wrought, what evils within a short space ensue. Such is human nature: it soon forgets. Or, do ye not remember what has been the case among ourselves? Did not God last year shake our whole city? Did not all run to baptism? Did not whoremongers and effeminate and corrupt persons leave their dwellings, and the places where they spent their time, and change and become religious? But three days passed, and they returned again to their own proper wickedness. And whence is this? From the excessive laziness. And what marvel if, when the things have passed away (this be the case), seeing that, the images lasting perpetually, the result is such?

St. John Chrysostom

Something to ponder in this age of terrorism and (sometimes) increased "religiosity."

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Math is your friend

"Proof" positive
Logic's loaded gun

Christian Faith is mighty not only when it agrees with sensory reasoning and sensory logic but when, and especially when, it contradicts sensory reasoning and sensory logic.

St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

A “new god” is clearly required by modern man, a god more closely fashioned after the pattern of such central modern concerns as science and business; it has, in fact, been an important intention of modern thought to provide such a god…the new god is not a Being but an idea, not revealed to faith and humility but constructed by the proud mind that still feels the need for 'explanation' when it has lost its desire for salvation…Whether 'deist,' 'idealist,' 'pantheist,' or 'immanentist,' all the modern gods are the same mental construct, fabricated by souls dead from the loss of faith in the true God.

Fr. Seraphim (Rose)

...when God does anything, reasonings are of no use; for how did He make us out of those things that were not?

St. John Chrysostom

Mega-something

I need to get in on this: Taking over

(maybe tomorrow I'll be one of the lucky 175000)

Baptists under attack

It appears there is someone out there that doesn't want the Baptists to have their little meetings: Bombshell Baptists

Friday, July 22, 2005

Under lock and key

That religion is a sickness with a specific cure is known from the tradition of the Old and New Testaments. However, that this sickness and cure exists in the Bible is known only to those who know that it is there and know how to use the Bible as a guide to said cure. For this reason the Bible is a closed book to all others, even to most Jews and Christians today. This means that Jews who accept the Old Testament alone, or Christians who accept both the Old and the New Testament, yet are not in the process of being cured under the guidance of one already cured, i.e. "glorified" (1 Cor. 12:26), automatically and unknowingly distort these books into supports for the sickness of religion, rather than its cure. Many such students of the Bible become Fundamentalists and at times quite dangerous. On the other hand the critical Biblical scholar, who uses whatever tools he has at his disposal to understand the Bible, cannot complete his task unless he knows the existence of the sickness of religion and its cure, and indeed in a Bible which is supposed to be his specialty.

Fr. John Romanides

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

I'm Jive With Ebonics

District to 'affirm' Ebonics


The common element in all of this is the degeneration of language into an instrument of rape. It does contain violence, albeit in latent form. And precisely this is one of the lessons recognized by Plato through his own experience with the sophist of his time, a lesson he sets before us as well. This lesson, in a nutshell, says: the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian powon can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. The degredation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies (concentration camps, torture), has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity. The dignity of the word, to be sure, consists in this: through the word is accomplished what no other means can accomplish, namely, communication based on reality. Once again it becomes evident that both areas, as has to be expected, are connected: the relationship based on mere power, and thus most miserable decay of human interaction, stands in direct proportion to the most devastating breakdown in orientation toward reality.

Josef Pieper


Our countrymen do not want to speak too much, not because they do not have an adequate vocabulary or imagination, but because they do not want to lose the substance of the spoken word. Through abuse, words have lost their power; once a word was equal to the act, but now words are devoid of real meaning; they have become abstract. This is why monks recommend silence.

Fr. Roman Braga

Found in "Cathedral of St. John the Divine" ...

Thursday, July 14, 2005

St. John, St. Gregory, St. Symeon, St. Gregory Palamas and Calvin(?)

Calvin the "Theologian"

A true definition of Theologian from Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos:
...theologians of the Church should be called "those who have reached theoria (vision of God)", who formerly purified their heart from passions or at least are struggling to purify them.

Further:
…the beholders of God, specifically those who follow the whole methodology of the Church and attain perfect faith -the illumination of the nous.

From the pen of Fr. John Romanides:
The true Orthodox theologian is the one who has direct knowledge of some of God's energies through illumination or knows them more through vision. Or he knows them indirectly through prophets, apostles and saints or through scripture, the writings of the Fathers and the decisions and acts of their Ecumenical and Local Councils. The theologian is the one who through this direct or mediated spiritual knowledge and vision knows clearly how to distinguish between the actions of God and those of creatures and especially the works of the devil and the demons.

And from St. Neilos:
"If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian"


From a true Theologian:
...He makes my disobedience His own as Head of the whole body. As long then as I am disobedient and rebellious, both by denial of God and by my passions, so long Christ also is called disobedient on my account. … But when all things shall be subdued unto Him on the one hand by acknowledgment of Him, and on the other by a reformation, then He Himself also will have fulfilled His submission, bringing me whom He has saved to God. For this, according to my view, is the subjection of Christ; namely, the fulfilling of the Father's Will. But as the Son subjects all to the Father, so does the Father to the Son; the One by His Work, the Other by His good pleasure, as we have already said. And thus He Who subjects presents to God that which he has subjected, making our condition His own. Of the same kind, it appears to me, is the expression, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" It was not He who was forsaken either by the Father, or by His own Godhead, as some have thought, as if It were afraid of the Passion, and therefore withdrew Itself from Him in His Sufferings (for who compelled Him either to be born on earth at all, or to be lifted up on the Cross?) But as I said, He was in His own Person representing us. For we were the forsaken and despised before, but now by the Sufferings of Him Who could not suffer, we were taken up and saved. Similarly, He makes His own our folly and our transgressions; and says what follows in the Psalm… For in His character of the Word He was neither obedient nor disobedient. For such expressions belong to servants… But, in the character of the Form of a Servant, He condescends to His fellow servants, nay, to His servants, and takes upon Him a strange form, bearing all me and mine in Himself, that in Himself He may exhaust the bad, as fire does wax, or as the sun does the mists of earth; and that I may partake of His nature by the blending. Thus He honours obedience by His action, and proves it experimentally by His Passion. For to possess the disposition is not enough, just as it would not be enough for us, unless we also proved it by our acts; for action is the proof of disposition. …by the art of His love for man He gauges our obedience, and measures all by comparison with His own Sufferings, so that He may know our condition by His own, and how much is demanded of us, and how much we yield, taking into the account, along with our environment, our weakness also.

St. Gregory the Theologian


And a swift kick in the pants from Khomyakov:
...having rejected legitimate tradition, it has deprived itself of every right to condemn a man who, while acknowledging the divinity of the Holy Scriptures, might not find in them the refutation of the error of Arius or Nestorius

Aleksei Stepanovich Khomyakov

Nothing like porn neon to get the word out...

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Lie, lie, lie

Can a lie be taken as communication? I tend to deny it. A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other’s share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality. And so: corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication—these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself. … The very moment, as I have stated, that someone in full awareness employs words yet explicitly disregards reality, he in fact ceases to communicate anything to the other.

Josef Pieper

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Rock of Ages

The Liberal view of government, as one might suspect, is an attempt at compromise between these two irreconcilable ideas [Orthodox Christian Monarchy and Anarchy]. In the 19th century this compromise took the form of "constitutional monarchies," an attempt--again--to wed an old form to a new content; today the chief representatives of the Liberal idea are the "republics" and "democracies" of Western Europe and America, most of which preserve a rather precarious balance between the forces of authority and Revolution, while professing to believe in both.

Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose

A Nation Build on the Rock?

Souvenirs from my run in with the law.....the law of gravity that is...

I'm going to have to go with the parking spot on this one...

Monday, July 11, 2005


I don't think I've ever seen anything as ambiguous and yet loaded as this add. We have the Rainbow/Push coalition (need I say more) in a time of "civil unions" presenting a conference, stealing a phrase from the constitution: "a more perfect union"; trying to connect their fight for "civil rights" to MLK jr. Add to that Jesse Jackson and you have one wacky tossed salad...

Malpractice

...from the viewpoint of Protestant needs, the WCC is certainly the best kind of medical treatment possible for the maladies of Protestantism. However, from the viewpoint of Orthodox needs, membership in the current organizational structure of the WCC is an aimless adventure, simply because the maladies of Orthodoxy and Protestantism are not the same.

Fr. John Romanides

Pertinent article: WCC One correction: they think there is a difference between the "Catholic" church and "Protestant" churches.

Friday, July 08, 2005


-Manly Help- -- I doubt this is immediatly as hilarious to you as to me so I will explain. "Help" is a feminine word so the adjective must be in feminine form-in this case "man". So you get girly "manly" help.

Coward- what a descriptive word.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Pip in Great Expectations

It still amazes me that a writer from 145 years ago could describe my life so well; I get the same feeling when I read Dostoyevsky.

Thursday, July 07, 2005


No stinkin' cars allowed!

In full bloom...

...the cult of individualism blossoms luxuriantly [in the West], finding prophets in fashionable philosophy and singers in the belles-lettres, Christ's ideal of the Church can, of course have no place; for it negates self-love and self-will in people and demands love from them all.

St. Hilarion (Troitsky)

incen-delicious

Now that my previously hardly existent readership has turned non-existent I am back from my Russia and etc. hiatus. As you can see I have changed the name of the blog to conform more to the current content; since you're here you obviously know that the address changed as well. So...