On this July 4th, let me post the video above and the lyrics from one of the songs from Les Misérables. This is the prayer of every parent who has a son or daughter in the Armed Forces. I was such a son once, drafted during Viet Nam. I have a daughter and a son-in-law […]

I found myself looking at fasting rules in the United States of America for Roman Catholics. I found myself startled at the changes in their fasting rules since the 1940’s. Having been raised as a Roman Catholic, I know that we were never supposed to eat meat on Fridays and that we were supposed to […]

Many of you remember sermons in church, statistics in political arguments, etc., that said that 1 out of every 2 marriages ends in divorce. In 1981, the vancouver family law firm reported that the number of marriages was 2,438,000 while the number of divorces was 1,219,000 or a rate of 10.6 marriages per 1,000 total […]

Saint Ernest of Mecca – Abbot of the abbey of Zwiefalten Died     1148 AD in MeccaFeast    November 7 Saint Ernest (died 1148) was the abbot of the Benedictine Zwiefalten Abbey at Zwiefalten, Germany during the 12th century. He participated in the Second Crusade fought by Christians between 1145 and 1149 to regain the Holy Land, […]

There are days when I have the very same questions that the little girl above has. There are many terms floating around for people born in either Central or South America. If you add in to that mix people born in Spain, one can have an interesting challenge in deciding what terminology to use. The […]

Classic Doonesbury (1975) by Garry Trudeau Reading about what is happening in Iraq with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria brought back certain memories. I was drafted in 1971 during the Viet Nam War. I was in the barracks on 23 January 1973 when President Nixon announced the Paris Peace Accords that would supposedly […]

“If a young woman who is a virgin is betrothed to a husband, and a man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry […]

From the website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in America: Suffering is not a problem, but an unfathomable, theoretically incomprehensible mystery. We should not try to explain suffering or construct theories about the reasons for suffering in the world and systematic explanations that seek to reconcile innocent suffering with belief in a good and all […]

The word “heretic” is indeed used too frequently nowadays. It has a definite meaning and function, to distinguish new teachings from the Orthodox teaching; but few of the non-Orthodox Christians today are consciously “heretics,” and it really does no good to call them that. In the end, I think, Fr. Dimitry Dudko’s attitude is the […]