354. Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long-leggety Beasties and Things that go Bump in the Night

It’s Hallowe’en! Let’s begin with a little something to get you in the mood.   It’s alright, folks. That was taken from (would you believe?) a 1940 Walt Disney movie: “Fantasia”. The music “Night on Bald Mountain” was composed by Russian Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1891), inspired by a short story by Nicholas Gogol. Here’s how it was […]

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283. 2020 Orthodox Statistics in America: Bad News and Good News

If you hate statistics, you may want to stop reading now. Come back next week. However, a better choice: If you want to find out what’s going on, you can do so the easy way. I’ll begin each section with a headline. Read those, at least. And out of the goodness of my computer, I’ll […]

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280. Some Great Stories about Some Great Men: Bishop Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan Philip, Father Thomas Hopko, Father Peter Gillquist

These are my own stories. I often think how blessed I was to become Orthodox during the era of these four great men – and even more blessed to have met all of them. (I mean, I was pastor of only a little parish church in the Midwest.) One I knew only in passing, and […]

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206. Father Thomas Hopko and his Fifty Five Maxims of Christian Living

Someone said “Everybody listens to advice. Nobody ever takes it”. But, oh, I hope you take this advice from the Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko. So my advice is: Put his Maxims in an icon on your computer screen, labeled in capital letters so you will see it and open it often. Or print out the Maxims and […]

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170. What does the Orthodox Church teach about the Afterlife? Part Three

Finally we come to the end of this series. I’ve found so much to talk and think about that I began to wonder, at my age, whether I’d live long enough to finish it – and then find out for myself if I had known what I was talking about! But I’m still here. So, […]

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