[Ancient Faith Radio; October 24, 2007]
I’m in the car today driving down I-95, going south (as usual) toward Washington, this time toward northern Virginia, where I’m going to a reunion of my seminary class at Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary. It’s our 30th anniversary so I’m going back on campus to hear some speakers today and to attempt to give the seminary library a stack of my books; we’ll see if they will accept these, we’ll see what happens. I expect so; they’re actually very gracious people at Virginia Seminary.
I’m thinking about a conversation I’ve been having, an email conversation, with a lot of people in the last couple of weeks, that has led up to an article just published on Beliefnet.com. Beliefnet was doing an interview with John Eldridge. Now if you don’t know that name,
[Ancient Faith Radio; October 17, 2007]
Last year, for Christmas, I gave each of my children a copy of a big, fat, almost 550-page book by Bill Bryson, titled A Short History of Nearly Everything. I had begun reading this book and was so fascinated that I wanted each of my children to have a copy so we could talk about it. Bill Bryson talks about in childhood being so interested in science, and disappointed to find out how boring it was in the classroom. He described looking at the cover of his science text, that showed a quarter of the Earth cut away so that you cold see the layers. And he thought, ‘How do they know that? How do they discover things like that?’ And not finding that answer in the book.
[Beliefnet; September 30, 2007]
In a time when churches of every description are faced with Vanishing Male Syndrome, men are showing up at Eastern Orthodox churches in numbers that, if not numerically impressive, are proportionately intriguing. This may be the only church which attracts and holds men in numbers equal to women. As Leon Podles wrote in his 1999 book, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, “The Orthodox are the only Christians who write basso profundo church music, or need to.”
Rather than guess why this is, I emailed a hundred Orthodox men, most of whom joined the Church as adults.
[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 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.
[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.
[Beliefnet, “Crunchy Cons”; July 27, 2007]
On July 26, 2007, Rod Dreher posted on his blog on Beliefnet.com, “Crunchy Cons,” the piece in the current Again Magazine about our from Anglican to Orthodox. He asked people to write in telling what triggered them to leave a church or a belief, or what caused them to decide to stay despite difficulties.
********
Thanks, Rod, for posting this and launching a strong conversation.
Daniel, thanks for this: «Why, after 16 years, does Matthews-Green still talk about her difference with the Episcopal church and use it as a way to covert people to her little corner of Orthodoxy? »
