It is a wonderful thing to know the Scriptures well, but there is a drawback: since we know how all the stories end, we can miss the drama inherent in the narrative. For example, In Luke 7:11f we can read about the grief of the widow of Nain, but since we know that her son’s death will end in his resurrection before he can be buried, we can skip too quickly from her sorrow to the happy ending and miss how terrible that grief must have been for her.

As reported in the Byzantine Texas blogsite, the Ecumenical Patriarch is calling for a unified observance of Easter by next year, 2025, to coincide with the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea. In a sermon he said, “We beseech the Lord of Glory that the forthcoming Easter celebration next year will not merely be a fortuitous occurrence, but rather the beginning of a unified date for its observance by both Eastern and Western Christianity.” Patriarch Bartholomew went on to declare that it was “a scandal to celebrate separately the unique event of the one Resurrection of the One Lord”.

Imagine my surprise to find that the view that Jesus was not divine was not confined to J.W.’s and Christadelphians. When perusing Facebook (just one of my bad habits) I found a debate televised on Faith Unaltered between Dr. Dale Tuggy (who denied the divinity of Jesus) and Dane Van Eyes (who affirmed it). Apparently cults like the J.W.’s were not the only ones now denying the divinity of Christ. Who knew?

When we are reading the literature of the ancient Hebrews (i.e. the Old Testament) it is important to be aware of the kind of glasses we are wearing—that is, we should be aware of the unspoken conceptual presuppositions that we bring to our reading. If we are not aware of our ingrained conceptual presuppositions, we can make mistakes in understanding ancient literature.

Now that Great Lent is upon us, the question sometimes arises about where we should put our spiritual focus. There are two places we should certainly not put our focus—and only one place where we should.

In reflecting on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, the Very Rev. Dr Bogdan Bucur calls our attention to the difference between the Lord’s invitation to those at his right hand in Matthew 25.34: “Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” and the injunction to those on His left, “‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt 25.41). In this account of the last judgment, the difference between those on the right and the left is their deeds during their earthly lives. Fr Bogdan urges us to consider the concrete actions the Lord is expecting us to take during our time on this Earth to physically and practically minister to all those in need around us.

Presented for your consideration (as Rod Serling used to say): an old man dressed up as an Orthodox priest-monk who is actually neither priest nor monk, performing outrageous antics both in public and online in a furious attempt to draw attention to himself. Mr. Milton Kapner calls himself Brother Nathanael, and he is a Jewish man who has attracted a large following of online listeners to his regular virulent anti-Semitic rants. Though he was once a novice in an Old Calendarist monastery in Colorado, he was kicked out of that monastery and is now not a monk at all, despite wearing monastic garb, but “a showman with a persecution complex who likes to be the center of attention” (from “Orthodox Christianity Then and Now”).

The work of the prophet Haggai is short and easy to miss; it is a mere two chapters in our Bibles sandwiched in between the books of Zephaniah and Zechariah. If you are flipping quickly through the final pages of the Old Testament he easy to miss. After ploughing through longer works such as those of Isaiah (66 chapters), Jeremiah (52 chapters, plus 5 more chapters of Lamentations), and Ezekiel (48 chapters), Haggai looks positively puny in comparison

I remember once when a friend was sharing with me his distress at the liberalism afflicting his Protestant denomination, and the fact that many of their clergy were denying such things as the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ. While murmuring sympathetically, I mentioned that such denials were not the same problem in the Orthodox Church. He then asked me what sort of things we did argue about. When I replied, “Well, things like whether or not a woman can receive Holy Communion while she is menstruating”, he looked at me funny. He didn’t ask, “What planet are you guys on?”, but I could tell he was thinking it. Loudly.

I have just finished reading Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity, by my friend Carl R. Trueman. Dr. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College, and a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (which, despite the title, has no connection with our own Eastern Orthodox Church).

Every so often one encounters something that breaks the head as well as the heart. By that I refer to things that not only wring the heart with grief, but also confound the head because they are so perversely stupid. One such thing is the recent conversion of a Tasmanian Orthodox priest by the name of David Gould who had been Orthodox for 45 years and who then converted to Islam two years after becoming a priest. He now goes by the name of Abdul Rahman.