Six months after receiving my Life Scout advancement, I was eligible to start working on my Eagle rank, the highest linear class in Boy Scouting. From the start, I knew I wanted to do something for St Vladimir’s Seminary. For some time I have noticed an area in the front...

In Father Alexander Schmemann’s important work, For the Life of the World , he teaches us that when we speak of “life” in the context of our experience of the Kingdom of God, we cannot separate “religious life” from our secular experience. Yet we slide easily into a weekly pattern...

St. Isaac says, “Silence is the language of the age to come.” Going beyond this thoughtful sentence, we know that in heaven the seraphim constantly sing, “Holy, holy, holy.” We might say that we need to be silent to access the music of heaven, the “Holy, holy, holy” refrain that...

Written by Fr. Lev Gillet, also known as “A Monk of the Eastern Church,” In Thy Presence is a book of short spiritual reflections on the presence of Christ. As in the case of the quotation below, these reflections are sometimes imagined as words spoken from our Lord to the...

I grew up steeped in art and in Orthodoxy as a daughter of a well-known iconographer. It didn’t take long for me to combine the two most important elements in my life! After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from an up-and-coming art school in New Hampshire, I began the...

St. John of Damascus (c. 675-749) was a theologian and hymnographer. He was one of the great defenders of the holy icons against the iconoclasts. The following are excerpts from his first treatise “against those who attack the holy images: “Of old, God the incorporeal and formless was never depicted...

At various times and circumstances in my life I’ve struggled with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of order. I’m a pretty well-ordered person, outwardly, but inside I often feel like I’m in danger of failure . . . and I find myself trying to address that by doing...

Matthew the Poor (1919-2006), also known as Matta El-Maskeen, was a Coptic Orthodox monk who lived in the desert 50 miles southwest of Cairo. This excerpt is from The Communion of Love , a collection of his writings that reveal the essence of the Christian life in simple yet profound...

"Orthodoxy does not need more professors, but confessors.” -Metropolitan Nicholas of Amissos St. John the Compassionate Mission was founded in 1986 among the poor and the marginalized of downtown Toronto and is an apostolate of the Carpatho-Russian diocese. The Mission has had, and has, a variety of different programs responding...

St. Paul encourages us in Eph. 4 to not behave like the rest of the world! As Christians we follow a higher standard. He tells us not to get lost in useless thoughts; futile thoughts he calls them. Because God gave us free will, we have total freedom of thought...