Patriarchal visit...

Our Patriarch, IGNATIUS IV, has arrived in the United States for a visit. I have had the distinct pleasure of both meeting and serving as Deacon with His Holiness and he is a remarkable man. We wish him many years, safe travels, and many good things as he travels among us.

Patriarch IGNATIUS is on the right (as you face the picture) and His Eminence, Metropolitan PHILIP is on the left.

Wish we Orthodox had this...

So what do you think? Would ours look the same? Different? How?

Bishops speak on Proposition 8...

California's Orthodox Bishop's speak in support of Proposition 8, an initiative to overturn the California Supreme Court's imposition of same sex marriage on the state.

As members of the Church and as citizens of this great land, we cannot withdraw from the society in which we live. Our parishes and our faithful are called upon to be “salt and light,” to paraphrase Christ, and as such, they engage with their neighbors in acts of charity and love. We will continue our charitable works, and our engagement with society — including to faithfully teach the truth about Christian principles of living...

Vandalized...

At approximately 2:00 AM this morning I received a call from the LaCrosse Police Department stating that windows had been broken at St. Elias. When I arrived at the church the police were there and had a young man, very intoxicated, in custody. At the present we have no idea behind his motivation but apparently he decided to throw objects at and into the church. Inside the church there was glass everywhere, a vodka bottle, an iron, and household garbage. Outside the church there was litter on the lawn, various objects including bottles, a pumpkin, stove parts, and other items that had been thrown at or against the church. Two large windows were broken and two smaller glass block windows suffered damage. There was also damage to the siding. We had no Orthros this morning as that time was dedicated to clean up but we patched up and served the Divine Liturgy.


Please remember the young man alleged to be the perpetrator in your prayers.

An election about the church...

Interesting thoughts from First Things...

But now we see Christians hedging and trimming and tying themselves into intellectual and moral knots in order to support candidates, including a presidential candidate, who explicitly and adamantly support an unlimited legal license to kill the unborn. They are fearful lest they be perceived as “one-issue” voters, although the one issue is the greatest human rights question of our time. Namely, should it be permissible to kill human beings because of their location, dependency, stage of development, or burdensomeness to others? To his great credit, Stanley Hauerwas has consistently answered that question in the negative. Behind that answer are many reasons—scientific, political, theological, and moral. Behind that answer is a conviction about what kind of people the Church is called to be.

Apparently...

Apparently one of my writings made the bulletin of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Mentor, Ohio.

I'm rapidly becoming an underground sensation. Smile.

Is there a God..?

Richard Dawkins, among the world's most famous atheists, allows for the possibility...

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

hat tip to mindful hack

Marriage, community, and consequences...

If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.

Read the whole article here...

More I couldn't resist...

From Len Jones...

I couldn't resist...

See the rest of the Reverend Fun collection here...