on the temple doorstep

I haven't said too much recently about what I'm reading. (Guess I've been spending so much time reading, that I haven't had ...

From today's reading in the Prolog of Ohrid, St. John of Rila's message to Tsar Peter the Bulgarian: If you desire the heavenly king...

Get your mind out of the gutter! :-) Ian's into playing with cards right now. He has several packs--some regular playing cards (boo, hi...

Julie and I watched Little Miss Sunshine last night. I think we both agreed it had a similar feel to Garden State (and wouldn't you kn...

In the past few days, two of the Orthodox blogs I read have had something to say about transience. First there was Godmother Laura 's mu...

A couple of months ago, I reflected on some of the early material in Karl Stern's The Pillar of Fire . I didn't cover much ground a...

The specifics of the reunification ceremony between ROCOR and Moscow have been released. In less than five months, it will be official!

We're back from Pittsburgh. It was good to see family, and the trip went largely without incident, but I can't say I'm entirely ...

Today is the commemoration of Ignatius of Antioch, which provoked me to go back and read some of his letters. Ignatius was bishop of Antioch...

The other day Ian broke one of Julie's Christmas decorations--a snowman hanger that we had on one of the dining room door handles. Appar...

I really don't intend to respond to every message in the Christmas series at my wife's church, but I guess so far it's shaping ...

An interesting little article in Christianity Today highlights the return of "Christmas" among retailers this year. (Frankly, I h...

I came across some interesting remarks in Bl. Theophylact the other day. He writes regarding Matt 11: 16-17. But whereunto shall I liken thi...

There's a cool visual representation of Middle East ruling powers throughout history. It stops short of the current era of U. S. coloni...

This morning I went with my wife to the evangelical church. The pastor was starting his Christmas series of sermons, called My Christmas Pra...

I finally got Bl. Theophylact's The Explanation of the New Testament (well, the volumes on Matthew, Mark, and Luke, anyway, which is al...

Well, I didn't exactly get to enter the holy of holies, but I did get a foot inside the door last night. Finally, after 2.5 years of ...

A good suggestion I received yesterday was to spend some time thinking and praying about the positive and negative effects that entering the...

The following passage is quoted in Orthodox Alaska (Michael Oleksa, p. 171) from the autobiography of Rev. S. Hall Young, a Presbyterian mi...

In a recorded talk I was listening to by Fr. Hopko, he spoke highly of the writings of Karl Stern, a Jewish-converted-to-Catholic psychologi...