A Variety of Topics: Saints, Seasons, Society, the Moral Life, plus Travels mostly to Greece, and more, by Father Bill Olnhausen
Why are we talking about this distressing subject? Because often the secular press wants chiefly to make headlines out of it, and the religious press either wants to score points or finds it too hot to handle. Can we deal with this in a balanced, positive Christian way? You judge whether I’m successful. If you’re hoping […]
Read More »March 23, 2022: This article has been revised slightly to correct a couple of inaccuracies, and to update it. His Death On November 8 in 1920, Saint Nektarios the Wonderworker died. The miracles began immediately. Today he is one of the most revered Orthodox saints of the 20th century. Bishop Nektarios had been ill, so […]
Read More »Why is it so hard to pray? I had decided that each evening during Lent I would spend 15 minutes in church saying the Jesus Prayer. Instead there I stood outside the church door reorganizing the bulletin board which didn’t need it, or walking over to my office to straighten up my desk which didn’t […]
Read More »Demons! Terrifying Destructive Evil Spirits! Now that we have your attention… let’s begin more gently and work up (down) to demons, the devil and the dark side. Hallowe’en Modern Hallowe’en has Christian origins. November 1 in Western Christianity is the feast of All Saints (“All Hallows” in old English), probably intended to counter a pagan […]
Read More »As I said last week, this was the heavy topic assigned to me at an Anglican-Orthodox conference in 2009. If you haven’t read Part 1, please do or you won’t make much sense of Part 2. Last week I described (humbly, I hope) Orthodoxy’s multi-cultural unity in “traditional Christianity”. This week is trickier: How does […]
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