Category: The Morning Offering

Never Converse With Demons In 1986 I spent fourteen days in retreat at Saint Tikhon Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. Staying in the monastic quarters, I had two weeks of wonderful fellowship with the monastics, worshiping in their temple, eating with them in trapeza, walking the trails through their forest,

None can be Saved without Compassion for Others We must not be so self-consumed as to have no compassion for others. Saint Basil tells us that a man who has two coats or two pair of shoes, when his neighbor has none, is a thief.  In the Holy Scriptures we

Lives Transformed Give Witness to the Faith That our Orthodox Church possesses the totality of Apostolic Truth is a given, yet if in our weakness as believers, the obviousness of that Truth is invisible to others, we will have betrayed that Truth. If in our weakness we fail to be

“A priest without his cassock is a priest without redemption.” Saint Paisios of the Holy Mountain An Orthodox priest should be the role-model of the Christian lifestyle and a beacon leading the people to the harbor of the Church and the Kingdom of God. Anything short of this will be

Therapeutic Tradition of the Church Most of us have been asked the question, ”are you saved?”, at least once in our life. Having its origin in the protestant soteriology (doctrine of salvation), this question has clearly become part of our American cultural lexicon. The question is often asked by Evangelical

Whom Do We See When We Look into the Face of Another? Our world is polarized in ways not seen in many generations. This polarization is brought closer to home because we now live in a nation that is far more cosmopolitan than in the past. Even small towns across

Tapping into the Noetic Memory of the Heart The heart does not only have a natural operation as a mere pump that circulates blood. In Orthodox patristic tradition the heart is the center of our self-awareness. Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain (+1809) calls the heart a natural and supernatural