Orthodox Christian

Lectures on the Resurrection, Women of the Cross, virtues

Christian resources bible church tools - Early Church Fathers Collection

St Innocent (Veniaminov)....While in Spanish California, Veniaminov visited the Franciscan missions along the coast, conversing with the Spanish monks in Latin. In a rare gesture of ecumenical goodwill for the time, Veniaminov even built small pipe organs for at least two of the Catholic missions.

A Good Article to Review: especially with the political power plays of Metropolitan PHILLIP/ ANTIOCH, REDUCING ALL American Antiochian Bishops to auxiliary bishops... AND the war of words/ "PAPAL OVERTURES" OF THE EP, with claims of authority over all "diaspora" churches, included all those in America; AND Metropolitan JONAH defending the years of work by Orthodox here in America to solve the multiple jurisdictional problems and strive for unity and a canonical American Autocephalous Church

The First European Catholic-Orthodox Forum`s statement on the family

A voice of Orthodox Christianity -Current Events (Orthodox News, Orthodox Times, Orthodox Worldview), photos, media, books, links, search

Today, in a country that was officially atheist about two decades ago, there are again hundreds of newspapers, magazines and newsletters covering the world's largest Orthodox church. There are about 3,500 Russian Orthodox Web sites, and some priests are even blogging.

The purpose of life is not to resist it or to indulge in it, but to live. As St. Ireneaus in the early second century observed, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive" as we see in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Marriage as a spiritual path moves along the "narrow path that leads to life" between these two extremes where the Divine Energies and the vital sap of daily life in the world converge. The Orthodox Church holds marriage in honor as a Mystery of the Church-a means of Grace uniting heaven and earth-where the word and action of the Lord turn ordinary water into the wine of the Spirit creating an effervescence in the soul of the partakers

In other words, grace is natural to man. The divine power is a part of man's NATURAL integrity. There is not a set of gifts given to "nature" and then another set of gifts given to "supernature". When our parents "fell from grace" there was not a fall into "nature" stripped of "supernature," rather it is something UNnatural (this means that there is no concept of 'natura pura' either actually or theoretically). The fall is a fall into dialectic. I cannot be a human person without grace. We stand within the Incarnation and understand this question and we can equally say with Michael Baius - against the Thomistic tradition on some conception of the "absolute gratuity of grace" without reference to the Incarnation - that given that God wills the mystery of His embodiment in Jesus Christ, God could not have created me other than I already am. The vision of God is natural to man, what God does in Redemption, He does in Creation. God intention in Creating was to will the mystery of His embodiment in Jesus Christ.

On the language of the liturgy: the language of the Bible\nFr. Alexander Schmemann in The prayer of the church is always biblical - i.e., expressed in the language, images, and symbols of the Holy Scripture. If the Bible contains the Divine Revelation to man, it is also man's inspired response to that Revelation and thus the pattern and the content of man's prayer, praise, and adoration.

Fr. Michael Pleckon\nMichael Plekon is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), is the associate priest at St. Gregory the Theologian Church, Wappingers Falls NY and is professor in the department of Sociology/Anthropology and the Program in Religion and Culture at Baruch College of the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1977.