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, September 27, 2007]
Last May, Father Thomas Hopko gave the commencement speech
at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. Somebody forwarded me the text of this, and
it’s so terrific. I sent it on to the
members of my family, and the subject line I used was, ‘A Hopko scorcher!’
because he can really be pretty scorching, when he gets going.
One thing that particularly interested me toward the end of
this speech was he started talking about a book by CS Lewis. He says, ‘I think all thinking Christians,
surely all seminary students and graduates, should be required to read it, the
most incisive analysis of what has happened to humanity in the last fifty
years.’ CS Lewis’ book, The Abolition of
Man, 1944. It is rather a short book; I think
it’s a series of three or four lectures that Lewis gave.
[Ancient Faith Radio; September 19, 2007]
It’s a hot Tuesday afternoon. I’m here at – I’m embarrassed to say where I
am – I’m in the parking lot at Taco Bell; I’m just about to go through the
drive through and get some lunch. But I
just pulled over for a minute to look around this corner. You have this corner where *you* live. At this stoplight I can see there’s Panera
Bread, Office Depot, Lowes Home Supply, Walgreens, Kmart, Target, Toys R Us,
Best Buy. That just scratches the
surface, you know? It’s everything that
clusters together, like birds of a feather: these big box stores and these very
big standard franchise outlets, all over the country. It doesn’t matter where I go, you know, if
I’m east coast, west coast, north or south, this same stuff, this is the
landscape everywhere you go.
[Ancient Faith Radio; September 13, 2007]
In early June I went to Los Angeles to speak at a conference at Pepperdine University that was on a fascinating topic; it was about a capella church music. I didn’t know this, but Pepperdine was established as a Church of Christ school—Church of Christ being a flavor of Christianity that is extremely Bible-based, very conservative in many senses, and in fact, they say the three things that make them different from most protestant churches is that they have weekly communion, they baptize by full immersion, and that everything in their worship is sung without instruments, it’s all a capella. They say they do these three things because that’s the way the early church did it, and of course as an Orthodox visitor to the campus, I was delighted to say, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we do it too.’ We certainly agree that that’s what the early church did.
[Ancient Faith Radio; September 13, 2007]
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In early June I went to Los Angeles to speak at a conference
at Pepperdine University that was on a fascinating topic; it was about a
capella church music. I didn’t know
this, but Pepperdine was established as a Church of Christ school—Church of
Christ being a flavor of Christianity that is extremely Bible-based, very
conservative in many senses, and in fact, they say the three things that make
them different from most protestant churches is that they have weekly communion,
they baptize by full immersion, and that everything in their worship is sung
without instruments, it’s all a capella.
They say they do these three things because that’s the way the early
church did it, and of course as an Orthodox visitor to the campus, I was
delighted to say, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we do it too.’ We certainly agree that that’s what the early
church did.
[Ancient Faith Radio; September 5, 2007]
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Frederica: Hello, I’m in Spokane Washington
at the conclusion of the ‘To the Ends of the Earth’ Conference sponsored by St.
Gregorios Malankar Syrian Orthodox Church, and I’m sitting here with, I would
say Khouria Heather Durka. We have all
these names for clergy wives: presbytera, and preoteasa, and Pani Matka, and
matushka and all these things, and here’s another one: Kochamma. And your tradition is in stead of saying Kochamma Heather, you say Heather Kochamma.
[Ancient Faith Radio; August 29, 2007]
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Frederica: I’m in
Spokane, Washington, with a conference titled ‘To the Ends of the Earth,’
sponsored by St. Gregorios Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church here in Spokane,
and they’ve brought people from all backgrounds and traditions here. I’m delighted to be talking to Fr. Anastasi St. Anthony, who is the abbot of the St.
Anthony monastery in, what is it, Newberry
Springs, California?
Where is that located in California?
[Ancient Faith Radio; August 23, 2007]
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Voiceover: We have a recording today of Frederica
Mathewes-Green addressing the audience at the Parish Life conference that was
recently held at Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Maryland, where Fr. Gregory
Mathewes-Green and Frederica serve. And
she’s reminiscing about their early days of Orthodoxy and how thankful she is
for the welcome they received.
Frederica: It’s amazing to me that Holy Cross is hosting the
Parish Life conference this year. We
started just 14 years ago, a handful of people, 19 people, meeting in rental
space in Catonsville. And that we have gotten to this point where
we can actually host a Parish Life Conference—I’m extraordinarily grateful to
God that we have the capability to do this.
And as my husband is now 60 years old, I’m extraordinarily grateful that
we’ll probably never have to do it again.
[Laughter] Once is enough in a lifetime! If you haven’t done it, you
don’t know how much work it is. I don’t
know how much work it is; I have to give a lot of the credit to someone who
would be an unsung hero otherwise: our brilliantly creative, our brilliant Shamassy,
Ina, who just has an imagination and an ability to accomplish the things that
she imagines that are going to set this Parish Life Conference apart. I’m eager to take part in it.
[Human Life Review, Summer 2007]
Shortly before Christmas, I got an email from the journalist and Slate.com editor Emily Bazelon. She said that she was writing an article for the New York Times magazine about “women’s experiences post-abortion.” She said she hoped to talk to me that day or the next, and apologized for the short notice. Since I was in and out of the office a lot those pre-holiday days, and thought we might not connect by phone in time, I drafted a quick email it hopes she could mine it for some quotes. Here’s what I wrote her:
[Ancient Faith Radio; August 16, 2007]
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Hello, I’m at the Parish Life Conference of my diocese, the
Diocese of Charleston-Oakland and the Midatlantic, and my parish, Holy Cross,
is the host. We’re at a hotel just north
of Baltimore in Towson, and getting close to wrapping up, on a Saturday morning
after breakfast. I’m sitting here with
Nancy Waggener, that is, Khouria Helen Waggener, and Rebecca Alfred, Khouria
Becky Alfred, and we’re going to talk a little bit about the Western Rite,
which is something many Orthodox are not familiar with—they don’t even know
that there is a Western Rite. Khouria
Becky is the wife of Fr. Gregory Alford, and—sorry?
[Ancient Faith Radio, August 9, 2007]
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Hi, this is Frederica Mathewes-Green. I’m in the car; there’s cars going by
me. I’m on I-95 south, driving from
Baltimore to Washington. And I was just
thinking that sometimes I’m comforted with the thought that I’m going to die
someday.
I’m going to give a speech this morning and it’s hard to
write. It’s hard to write and speak in
contexts other than Orthodox for me, because when I talk to secular people or
to other sorts of Christians, the whole worldview, the whole framework, the
whole vocabulary is so different from what I’ve gotten used to and come to love
so much in Orthodoxy. And I’ve got a
speech I’ve been writing for the last several weeks; it’s three times as long
as the time they’ve given me to speak.
I’m so anxious to be able to express what I’m saying without being
misunderstood. And, you know, that’s
tiring.
