You remember when you were a kid and Christmas seemed to take forever. My mom used to use that old tried and true way to get me and my brother to behave through the year: “Boys, Santa is watching and Christmas is just (fill in the blank) away!” Well, the older I got the shorter that line…
Fr. Barnabas Powell
I’m convinced everyone wants to know God. Everyone. Even the most radical atheist or hedonist wants to know God above everything else. In fact, I’m convinced a man is an atheist because he is so angry that the God he longs for at the very core of his being doesn’t exist and it’s this existential…
I was reading a seventh-grade public school exam from many decades ago and was struck with the level of language, grammar, and difficulty of the exam. It was very sophisticated and I struggled to “pass!”
No one can look at the current culture and not witness the coarsening of the language of our day. Between the mainstreaming of…
It’s always funny to hear people talk about what they think the Faith means by eternal life. I remember one movie from the 1990 called “Ghost” with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. The movie was about this tragic murder of a man and how the woman he loves copes with this tragedy. Of course, the…
It’s hard to admit, but there are times when I really struggle with laziness. I know, I know, how can I say that with all that’s going on in the ministry. But laziness isn’t merely inactivity. It can also be the wrong allocation of strengths and gifts that waste those strengths and gifts. It is…
“We are of one mind about this.” I heard his words and I understood each word and its meaning, but I had never heard this put this way before – “of one mind.” What did he mean? But, hey, I was a kid of 22 and the situation was such that I was hoping he…
Recently a Presbytera (that’s what we call the wife of the priest) passed away after a heroic struggle with breast cancer. This woman was a young woman with a husband and 17-year-old daughter who struggled with their mother for the years she battled this illness. I knew this family because I had attended seminary with…
Let’s see; thinking of things that go great together – ham and eggs, peanut butter and jelly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Tom and Jerry, a crisp, cool morning and a warm cup of coffee, bacon and, well more bacon!
OK, so that’s a bit silly, but there are some things in life that simply always…
"But, how does it work?” That was the question burning in my mind as a young, curious, typical pre-teen boy. So, I did what any normal kid would do. I took the clock apart! Still didn’t get my question answered because I didn’t understand the concept of the gears and spring system AND the clock…
Friedrich Nietzsche declared “Faith means not wanting to know what is true.” And Fr. Seraphim Rose responds: “Atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.… Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense…