Frederica Mathewes-Green is a wide-ranging author who has published 11 books and 800 essays, in such diverse publications as the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Smithsonian, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a regular commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), a columnist for the Religion News Service, Beliefnet.com, and Christianity Today, and a podcaster for Ancient Faith Radio. (She was also a consultant for Veggie Tales.) She has published 10 books, and has appeared as a speaker over 600 times, at places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Calvin, Baylor, and Westmont, and received a Doctor of Letters (honorary) from King University. She has been interviewed over 700 times, on venues like PrimeTime Live, the 700 Club, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Gregory Mathewes-Green, in Johnson City, TN. Their three children are grown and married, and they have fifteen grandchildren.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 21, 2009]
F: I’m here in Macon, Georgia, being driven to the shuttle that’s going to carry me back to the airport so I can fly home. I’ve been speaking this weekend at Mercer University and Wesleyan University, and also last night at St. Innocent OCA Church. My driver this morning is Tom Kehayes. He was telling me last night about how this church happened to be built. We’re driving at dawn, and it’s lovely; the mist is rising, and I’m sure the deer are stalking around in the woods on this two-lane road. Suddenly out of nowhere there’s an opening and there’s a Georgian church—a perfect replica of a church in the nation of Georgia, is that right?
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 14, 2009]
F: I’m here at Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne, West Virginia. A Russian Church Monastery here in a “holler”—a sort of bowl in the mountains, where a valley comes to an end with the mountains rising on all sides. It’s a lovely monastery. Fr. Seraphim, you were saying that it was founded in 1986 in St. Louis, and then moved to this location. Would you say something to listeners—those who are new to Orthodoxy or outside Orthodoxy—on the question, “Why monasticism?” It can look like a self-indulgent choice—you just go off, take it easy, and other people support you—but it’s very much not that way.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 1, 2009]
F: Today I’m in Towson, Maryland, in the offices of the IOCC, International Orthodox Christian Charities. When was IOCC founded?
Nick: It was founded in 1992, sixteen years ago.
F: I’m speaking to Nick Chakos, Development Officer, in Nick’s office here at IOCC. I’m a proud momma because my son Stephen has begun working here recently, and I’d never been to these offices before, even though it’s just around the beltway; you’re north of Baltimore, only about a half-hour drive from me. I’m really glad to be able to see this place. I’m sure there are some listeners who have never heard of IOCC, or might have heard of IOCC but don’t have a clear idea of what IOCC does. I was surprised to find that it’s a much broader outreach than I was aware of. I thought you did lightning-strike work, like the Red Cross—you go in, do emergency supplies, and go out again. But you get much more involved in the life of the community. Tell me a little more about that, and some of the places where IOCC is working.
It’s the little things that count. Director Wes Anderson has always been good with the little things, filling movies like Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007) with extraordinary, eye-catching detail. In Fantastic Mr. Fox the things are littler than ever, as the tallest actor is only 18” high. This film is an example of stop-motion animation, in which tiny figures are photographed, moved a fraction of an inch, and photographed again. It takes 24 photos to create one second of smoothly-moving screen time, so this kind of animation represents an enormous amount of labor.
[Holy Cross Orthodox Church; November 22, 2009]
This weekend we are remembering the repose of Fr. George Calciu, who died on November 21, 2006, just two days before 81st birthday. He died of pancreatic cancer, a fast-moving and painful cancer, and had barely survived long enough to complete one last trip to his homeland, Romania.
The news reached us on a Sunday evening that he had taken a turn for the worse. Father Gregory and I were hosting a gathering for Orthodox young people at our home that night, but I left our guests and went with Chris Vladimir to the hospital.
[Ancient Faith Radio; Feb 13, 2008]
I had a recent podcast about Roe v Wade, and heard some helpful comments from a couple of alert listeners who noticed a couple of things that I said that weren’t quite accurate. I was, in some respects, talking off the top of my head. I did get confused when I was talking about a Supreme Court decision that counted African Americans as two-fifths of a person, I had mixed a couple of things together.
[Ancient Faith Radio; Feb 6, 2008]
Frederica: Not too long ago, I was interviewed on an evangelical radio station about the Jesus Prayer. There were two hosts on this show, and one of them had contacted me and had said “Is there anything you’d like to talk about,” and I said “Well, let’s talk about the Jesus Prayer.” And I sent him an email copy of the chapter in my book The Illumined Heart about the Jesus Prayer.
[Ancient Faith Radio; April 8, 2008]
Well, another Forgiveness Vespers has arrived, and challenged us in many ways, not least challenging those muscles that run up the back of our legs, with all the making metanias, and certainly brought forth some tears and a lot of hugs, and a profound sense of being bonded with the other people in our church. At Holy Cross, we have about—I guess on a Sunday morning we see a hundred to a hundred thirty people. There’s some variation; people travel and visitors show up. But at Forgiveness Vespers, we usually have around a hundred people there.
F: I’m sitting at my kitchen table on a Thursday morning, talking to my son Stephen Mathewes, who is going away tomorrow. He’s going to drive up to Holy Cross Seminary in Brookline, Massachusetts, and begin classes as a seminarian, and, hopefully, in three years graduate and be ordained a priest. Dad and I are very, very proud of you, son.S: Thank you.F: [laughs] But he also has a sideline. He was a Musicology major in college, and during the course of that time, to pick up a little extra cash, he became a piano tuner. Now, some years ago, when you all were small, I read an article in a magazine or a newspaper, assessing, “What is the very best possible job?” Of all the jobs, of all the professions. And they ranked them by different categories, like how much flexibility do you have? How stressful is it? Are you exposed to the elements? Are you out in the rain? And when they combined all of that, the best job in the world was piano tuner.
