“Become merciful (it says in the Greek) even as your Father is merciful.” There is movement and action. The word become implies change and growth and development. God is merciful and loving and he never changes. We are the ones who are changeable. The scary thing is that we have the same potential to become unmerciful as we have to become merciful. We are Orthodox Christians. I am very comfortable with that statement. I am also comfortable with

A seemingly less discussed source of controversy within Christendom is the topic of prayers for the departed.  In fact, I had never even heard of such a practice until more recent years.  I believe that this is primarily due to a gaping paradigmatic difference in the understanding of soteriology [doctrines of salvation] from East to West that eventually led to the dispensing of this historically Christian practice from the memory of contemporary low-church Western traditions.

In American contemporary Christian culture the word “saved” gets thrown around quite often; so often in fact that the concept of salvation to which it refers seems to have become minimized to refer solely to the moment of one’s mental conversion to Christianity.  The term has become overused within a fixed paradigm with very limited vocabulary in which a preaching individual presents the gospel or lays out the plan of salvation, to the point that

In a previous article I endeavored to outline a central uniqueness of Christianity in that it holds to neither a belief that the natural cosmos is all that there is, nor a denial of the material world as an irrelevant distraction or illusion from one’s spiritual life with God.  Rather, the Christian faith is a sacramental life of pursuit of God through the utilization of physical matter according to God’s expression to His creatures and