12/21/2013
Sergei Khudiev
Our life is a mission to us from God. However, this does not negate some simple earthly things.
The idea of being eternally and abundantly thankful seems unpleasant and ridiculous to non-believers; though sometimes they can’t formulate the reason clearly, this idea “creates problems” to them. The need to thank our neighbors here on earth often bothers us as well. Why?
Rating: 9.3|Votes: 18
In glorifying the Cross, we proclaim our faith in what will finally conquer not by force, which frightens and coerces, but by love, which endures crucifixion.
Rating: 9.5|Votes: 30
Every person has an instinctive need to belong to a nationality, and this is natural—we were not created as dry sand, but as a body, an organism; and each of us needs to find his place in the family of man. There is no such thing as abstract people; people always belong to some form of social group, like a family or a nation, and losing this belonging deprives a person of something very important.
Rating: 10|Votes: 3
What did this Council accomplish? It defended the Church’s faith that in our Lord Jesus Christ we meet not simply Someone great or even supernatural—we meet God.
Is beauty—the beauty of God’s world and the beauty created by pious people—a witness to God, or is it something unnecessary and empty?
Rating: 9.5|Votes: 2
There are questions which we cannot avoid and from which we cannot hide in a fog of rhetorical questions and vague allusions. Basically, there is the question of whether single-sex cohabitation is a sin which separates people from the Church, or not.
Rating: 8.8|Votes: 5
People ask about some kind of icon or prayer that would set things straight. But you cannot set matters straight this way. The Church has no "white magic" to neutralize the "black". This is not the school of protection against the dark arts.
Rating: 6.8|Votes: 6
The prophet does not at all want them to repent. God’s wrath has already been way too slow in coming. Nineveh will be destroyed? Good! The sooner the better! Finally! Let them reap what they have sown, let the same horror reign in their streets as what they brought to other cities! No one will have any regrets over this—least of all Jonah!So, when God sent Jonah to give the Ninevites their last chance, the prophet did not even want to go.
Rating: 9.3|Votes: 7
First of all, what does the word “brethren” mean? In the Bible it can signify various degrees of relation: blood brother, half-brother, or cousin. Some Protestant Bible scholars consider that after giving birth to Jesus, Mary had children by Joseph, and it is these children who are mentioned here.
Rating: 9.8|Votes: 14
The story of St. Mary is the story of a repentant harlot. Why does the Church find this story so important? Why does the whole Orthodox world remember this woman?
Rating: 6.6|Votes: 10
Contrary to what the advocates of abortions usually say, there is nothing specifically religious in recognizing abortion to be murder. "You must not deprive an innocent human being of life" is an evident moral truth known to people even outside of Biblical revelation.
