I had no idea. To be more precise, before I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, I knew that the Orthodox Church had been harshly suppressed by the communists, but I had no idea that the cruelty of persecution often equaled that inflicted on the early church. … Continue Reading »
As a child I had almost no direct contact with Catholicism. My family attended a small backwoods fundamentalist congregation”The First Church of Hellfire and Damnation, or something similarly named”and the preacher would often mention the Pope and Catholicism in one of his “Identifying the Antichrist” sermons. … Continue Reading »
ROME”For the past six weeks, I’ve had the privilege of participating in the station church pilgrimage of Lent, a Roman tradition that dates back to Christian antiquity. From at least the early fourth century, the Pope celebrated Mass during Lent with his clergy and the Roman Christian community at a designated “station” church… . Continue Reading »
When I was young and trying to be what my mother used to call a “career girl,” (and didn’t it sound unseemly coming from her lips!) I worked briefly at a job I barely remember. I misremember the job because I was never any good at it; the last girl at the desk had left abruptly, and so my training relied upon a half-instinct, half-dunce-cap pedagogy. … Continue Reading »
On April 14, in Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Obama a three-judge panel from the U.S. Seventh Circuit overturned a lower court ruling that a 1998 statute designating the first Thursday in May as the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. Meanwhile, earlier this month, in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, the Supreme Court handed down an important decision allowing an Arizona tax policy that ends up providing financial help to private schools, including religious ones, to continue… Continue Reading »
A widely known, at least in the Jewish world, rabbinic maxim states that there are “shiv’im panim laTorah” (literally translated, 70 faces to [every item in the] Pentateuch). This phrase has been taken to mean that a plethora of interpretive possibilities lie within the words of the Pentateuch (Torah). As such, it is no wonder that rabbinic homilies often start off with the line, “there is a famous disagreement between one commentator and another … Continue Reading »
Thanks to Vatican II most Christian denominations now use some version of the common lectionary from 1969”a set series of scripture readings designated for each Sunday repeated over a three-year cycle conforming to the liturgical calendar. The three years in the cycle are called Year A, Year B and”yes, wait for it”Year C. And because it is a “common” lectionary Catholics and most Protestants frequently find themselves on the same biblical page on the same Sunday (or only a Sunday or two apart) reading the same passage as everyone else from one of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John… . Continue Reading »
“When I lie on my back and look up at the Milky Way on a clear night and see the vast distances of space and reflect that these are also vast differences of time as well, when I look at the Grand Canyon and see the strata going down, down, down, through periods of time which the human mind can’t comprehend … . Continue Reading »
Those of us in the pro-life movement often claim that we live in a “culture of death.” But most of us don’t believe it. Not really. We may use the phrase as a rhetorical tool, but deep in our hearts we think that our family, friends, and neighbors wouldn’t knowingly kill another human being. We convince ourselves that they simply don’t realize what they’re doing… . Continue Reading »
Dr. Habib Malik of the Lebanese American University has been a friend for many years. Few men have such an informed and humane view of the sad, even desperate, position of Christians in the Middle East. As a Lebanese Maronite with a Harvard doctorate in intellectual history, what Dr. Malik knows comes from experience as well as impeccable scholarship. … Continue Reading »
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