A wonderful paragraph from the sermons of St. John Chrysostom that I happened to read the other day. It is actually from the first sermon in the series of 90 sermons on the Gospel of Matthew that Chrysostom preached around the year 390. It is quite extraordinary; no wonder Chrysostom is the "Golden-Mouthed". Photo of …
What don’t you understand?
One can say, I don’t understand all this high theology, I don’t understand what Liturgy is all about, I don’t understand how bread and wine can be the body and blood of Christ. One can say any of these things and be sincere. But what don’t you understand about “Go and do likewise”? It’s …
The Passions of God
Fr. Sophrony Sakharov, a highly esteemed Russian monk who died in 1993 at his monastery in England, used to say, ‘To be a Christian, one must be like an artist.’ Just as artists are captivated by the subjects they paint and by the desire to portray them as perfectly as possible, so too the …
When our thinking is turned upside down
A few years ago two important books were published: Debt, the First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber (2011, revised 2014); and Le Capital au XXI siècle (2013) by the French economist Thomas Piketty, quickly translated into English as Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and many other languages. Piketty's book became an immediate sensation and …