In church I stand up front, on the right, facing the icon of St. John the Forerunner. He is standing on a desert landscape, rainbow wings extending behind him, while a bowl at his feet displays his severed head. One hand is lifted imploringly toward Christ, and from the other a scroll tumbles open:O Word of God,See what they suffer, Those who censure the faults of the ungodly;Unable to bear rebuke,Behold, Herod has cut off my head,O Savior.
I didn’t plan on being a beekeeper. It all started one afternoon when I was taking a walk around the block, and came upon a scene of chaos and frenzy. Some neighbors were having work done while they were out of town, and workmen had been taking down a big tree. One of the guys had been high on a ladder when his chainsaw bit directly into a honeycomb.
People harbor differing sentiments toward bees. The guy on the ladder began scooping handfuls of honey, laughing and telling his buddies how good it was, unfazed by the stings. His boss, on the ground, was gripped by a terror approaching apoplexy. By the time I got there the workmen had laid the trunk on the ground and were trying to drive the bees away from the tree by several methods; most recently, they had set it on fire.
Here is why abortion is the most important justice issue of our time.
1. It is wrong to discriminate, and worse to persecute, still worse to imprison, even worse to torture, and worst of all to kill.
Abortion kills.
2. It is wrong to kill violent adults, if they can be stopped any other way. It is worse to kill non-violent adults. It is even worse to kill children.
Abortion kills children.
3. In 2011, there were 908 child fatalities from car accidents. There weere 1620 child fatalities from abuse and neglect. And there were 1,058,490 child fatalities from abortion.
Abortion kills children in overwhelming numbers.
In the Roe v Wade decision, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that, if the fetus is a person, the right to abortion collapses. (Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 [1973] Section IX.)
How can we tell whether it is a person or not?
Here’s what science shows. From the beginning, the unborn is:1. Alive. It is living and growing, always increasing in size and complexity.2. Human. Its body is composed entirely of human cells.3. Individual. It has unique DNA. If a cell from the mother, the father, and the unborn child were examined side by side, it would reveal that they came from three different people.
A young man sent me an email saying that he was wondering whether he was autistic, and wether he should get himself evaluated by a doctor. I asked an autistic young man I knew to reply.
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I’m a thirty-year-old man, Orthodox since infancy, diagnosed with Aspergers before age ten. I’ve been married for four years, and have a young child. I haven’t been all that professionally successful myself, for various reasons which can be summarized as “grew up lazy and got a useless degree.” I should note that I have a very mild form of Asperger’s (I can pass for an extrovert), and every case is different anyway, so not everything I say will necessarily apply.
Like elementary school students, writers are regularly asked to supply an essay to fit an assigned title. When I learned that the title of this essay would be “The High and Holy Calling of Being a Wife,” I did what any sensible person would do: I tried to get out of it.
My husband and I celebrated our 40th anniversary last spring, so I have extensive experience in being a wife. But whatever I’ve been doing around here for the last 40 years, “high” and “holy” aren’t terms that immediately spring to mind. For most of us, married life is something we make up as we go along. We learn some deep truths along the way, but usually immediately after it would have been really useful to have known said truth. Whatever height or holiness might have resulted would be entirely the Lord’s doing, not our own.
Princess Alice’s aunts were St. Elizabeth the New Martyr and Tsarina St. Alexandra the New Martyr, so it’s no surprise that Tsar Nicholas II attended her 1905 wedding. This anecdote shows a completely different side to his personality—funloving, carefree—which is consoling to hear.
[Sinteza magazine, Romania, Summer or Fall 2015]
-Which is now the place of Orthodoxy in a world of such a great religious diversity as America? What do Americans generally know about the Orthodox Church? What do they know about Romania?
America was founded mostly by Protestants, though some areas were populated by Roman Catholics. But over the years it has become extremely diverse, such that people of every land and every faith are visible in our cities. We are not as free to display Christian symbols, such as a cross or a stone engraved with the Ten Commandments. People of other faiths protest and demand equal time. Recently, a group of Satanists demanded the right to place a statue of Satan next to a stone carved with the Ten Commandments on a public lawn. Atheists also attack the expression of Christian beliefs in public places. While a very large percentage of the country is still Christian, the people in power tend to be atheists and despise Christians (in part because we oppose abortion and same-sex marriage).
“Inside Out,” the latest animated film from Pixar Studios, is really two movies. One is for kids, and the other is for adults—or, more precisely, parents. But it’s not like other kiddie cartoons that throw in pop culture references and borderline-dirty jokes. This time it’s different.
The kid-level movie is about a girl named Riley, 11 years old, who has just moved to San Francisco from Minnesota. She had to leave behind all her friends, her hockey team, every place that had been dear to her. Now she’s living in an old house that’s dingy and gray, and the neighborhood pizza parlor specializes in broccoli.
I was delighted to be asked to write about the “Role of Men,” because I’ve read so many articles by men about the role of women. Such essays always give me the feeling that men consider themselves the standard, and women the variation. (That assumption was evident in an American magazine some years ago, when its cover offered an article titled “Why Women are Different.”)
