Tag archive for ‘worldview’

Hallowe’en: An Orthodox approach

Hallowe’en: An Orthodox approach

Every year, on Hallowe’en, I sit on the front porch of my house with a bowl of candy, a box of beeswax candles, and a large icon for the Feast of All Saints. Every child who comes to the house gets a piece of candy, and may also light a candle and place it before the icon.

Out of the mouths of babes and atheists…

Out of the mouths of babes and atheists…

“Mankind is more than the janitor of planet Earth,” writes Brendan O’Neill. “I am avowedly atheist. But listening to the bishops’ drab, eco-pious Christmas sermons, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Bring back God!’”

I am a Spiritual Materialist!

I am a Spiritual Materialist!

God looked upon what He had done and said “It is very good.” This certainly includes matter. Evil often surfaces, not from the material itself, but from the misuse and misdirection of “things” thus differing from the plan of the Creator. The dour, grim, unsmiling deviation which one sometimes finds in neurotic Christians is hardly within our real tradition…

Pietism as an ecclesiological heresy

Pietism as an ecclesiological heresy

Pietism made its appearance as a distinct historical movement within Protestantism, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, around 1690-1730. 1 Its aim was to stress “practical piety,” as distinct from the polemical dogmatic theology to which the Reformation had initially given a certain priority. Under different forms and in various “movements,” it has not ceased to influence Protestantism, and indeed also the spiritual life of other churches, to this day…