I have no time to pray. I have two young children, a demanding academic schedule, a wife who has a full time job, an internship, friendships to maintain, dinner to cook, clothes to wash, groceries to get, choir practice, exercise…and today I have to take the car for an oil...
Hi. I am Fr. Paul Rivers. I serve as a Chaplain in the US Army. I have been on active duty with the Army since graduating from St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2008. After going through Chaplain Basic Officer Leadership Course at Fort Jackson, South Carolina during the summer of 2008...
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...