Month: February 2010

Met. Hilarion

Many ask: what does it mean to be a Christian? This is what we read in the 3d century manuscript known as ‘A Letter to Diognetus’ and ascribed to St. Justin the Martyr: ‘there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country… To speak in general terms, the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body’.

These words speak to us about the self-determination of the early Christian community. In spite of the fact that many centuries have elapsed since this letter was written, its words in fact concern each of us. We really live in our own country, while wearing the same clothes, other people do and speak in the same language as those around us, but we are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
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Final document of the plenary session of the Christian Interconfessional Consultative Committee of the CIS and Baltic countries, Moscow, 4 February 2010

4.02.2010 · Analitics, Inter-Christian relations, New documents

Christian Churches of the CIS and Baltic countries, in a plenary session of the Christian Interconfessional Consultative Committee of the CIS and Baltic countries held in Moscow on 4 February 2010, have thoroughly considered the theme “Christian Family – a ‘little church’ and a basis of healthy society” and state their common views on family relations. Our understanding of the role of the family proceeds from the Holy Scriptures as the highest authority in the matters of morality and is based on the centuries-long experience of the church care for the families.

Participants in the meeting express their common concern for the devaluation of value of the family and marriage in contemporary society.

We are confident that family has been established by God and is a basis of pubic life. Family in a Christian understanding is a communion of persons recognizing God as the centre of their life, being united by love, and capable of maintaining harmonious relations with each other, society, and the state. The Church should guard the biblical understanding of the family, since if there is no family, there will be neither individuals, nor society.

Family begins with marriage. Marriage is a legitimate union of man and woman, and the Holy Scripture explicitly tells us of the inadmissibility of any other form of cohabitation. A union of people of the same sex is sinful and cannot be considered a marriage (cf. Rom 1:18-32; 1 Cor 6:9-11).
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Interfax

Moscow, February 9, Interfax – Many intellectuals in the West are embarrassed to confess their faith, Tatiana Goricheva, an Orthodox philosopher, journalist and missionary said.

“Academic environment in Europe dramatically differs from ours. Even if a person is a deep believer, he will keep silence about it or offer some snobby excuses for his religious feeling. Thus, a question of faith in Western intellectual circles is a taboo,” Goricheva said in her interview published by the the Foma magazine in February.

Sociologist Levi-Stross, a close friend of hers, told, “he secretly meets with like-minded people to talk about their faith.”

Goricheva delivers her lections on Orthodoxy all around the world for Christians of different confessions, politicians, public figures, representatives of scientific and culture elite.

According to the journalist, “people in the West can’t make sense of their lives as if they are torn apart” and try to escape depression with the help of ideology.
Even some pastors “are lying on psychoanalysts’ sofas.”

“Clerics in the West are often very lonely and in state of depression,” Goricheva said.