Month: January 2011

Interview with Frederica Mathewes-Green and Fr. Hans Jacobse [AUDIO]

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After the debate in Maryland, Frederica and Fr. Gregory Mathewes-Green invited me to their home for breakfast on the way to the airport. It was the first time I met them. Frederica is a very gracious woman. She made a beautiful breakfast (homemade pancakes, I love pancakes, these were great), we had some great conversation, and then she pulled out a portable microphone and started interviewing me. Fr. Gregory told me she carries the microphone in her purse and when the muse strikes her she records a podcast. What follows is the interview, a kind of immediate reflection on the debate two days earlier.

Why A Chinese Buddhist Became an Orthodox Athonite Monk

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HT: Msytagogy

By Fr. Libyos

On my last trip to Mount Athos I visited the Monastery of Simonopetra. It is a majestic monastery and the sky was fully blue. There I met a graceful novice monk from China. In truth, he surprised me by his presence. An Orthodox rason on a Chinese man? I was moved somewhat. I had never seen this before up close, only in pictures of missions. An inheritor of a great cultural tradition and for him to embrace Christianity? My friends and I got curious to ask him about this.

“Brother, how did you, a Chinese man, embrace Orthodox Christian monasticism coming from such a great cultural tradition? Were you a Buddhist?”

“Yes, of course, I was a Buddhist.”

“What won you over to Christianity?”

“Divine companionship!”

“Excuse me?”
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Bishop Suriel on the Attacks on the Coptic Orthodox in Egypt [VIDEO]

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Outstanding! A Coptic Orthodox Bishop calls on all Christians everywhere to protest the injustice of Muslim persecution of Christians worldwide.

Some Thoughts on Atheism

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I wrote this as a comment below but it just might qualify as essay material so I have included it here as well.

Darwinian evolution (a process of linear development) would not have been conceptually possible in the pagan world because the notion of linear time and thus progress, require Christian philosophical presuppositions. This notion entered the world through Genesis, the narrative that portrays time and space as created, rather than eternal entities. This radical break from paganism, to which the entire world was subject until Christ entered the world, was difficult even for Christians to fully comprehend at first (Origen for example, despite his brilliance, could never shake the notion of circular time), and it would be many centuries later before the full power (freedom really) of these concepts would bear fruit. The scientific system in other words, could not have developed anywhere except in a Christian culture.

Darwin was a philosophical materialist. His theory (randomness in particular) is wholly dependent on philosophical materialism. I approach the Christian – atheist debate in terms of the history of ideas (I have to leave the science to others). Freud fell, Marx fell, and I believe that the Darwinian collapse is inevitable as well. Taking a long view it might be that Dawkins, Hitchens, and the other radical atheists represent little more than the last gasps of a dying philosophy.
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UNIVERSAL, GEOGRAPHIC, ECCLESIASTIC, JURISDICTION: Is Such A Concept Orthodox?

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Archbishop Nathaniel

Archbishop Nathaniel of Detroit | Originally published in Solia – The Herald, February 2000 HT: St. Andrew House Discussion Forum

When an Orthodox Christian is asked to state what is considered to be a major difference between Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism, the response is: “We don’t have a pope.” In other words, Ortho- doxy does not recognize the claim of the Bishop of Rome to have universal jurisdiction over the Church.

Jesus put a question to his disciples. “But you, who do you say I am?’ Then Simon Peter spoke up and said, `You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ Jesus replied, `Simon son of Jonah, you are a blessed man! Because it was no human agency that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. So now I say to you: You are Peter and on this rock I will build my community.” (Mt 16:15-18 NJB)

The Church of Rome interprets this to mean that the person Simon son of Jonah; now called “Peter,” would be the individual in whom would reside the fullness of Christ’s own authority after the earthly mission of the Lord had been fulfilled. In other words, Peter’s personal profession of faith gave him the authority to be the guarantor of the Christian faith.
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