Fr. Stephen Freeman
At every turn, the source of our hope is simply what we have seen accomplished in Christ. We have His promises: I go to prepare a place for you, and if I prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. (Joh 14:3) The fullness of the life of the Church teaches us how to hope and how to pray. It does not teach us what has not been given us to know.
Jesse Dominick
The Fathers tell us there are boundaries of nature. Everything in creation is not fluid, going where it wills. Everything is defined by God, in the mind of God. Everything has its logos. This is why the Fathers emphasize that kind reproduces after kind and that the boundaries of nature can’t be broken down—you can’t break down the nature of dogness and make something new—because it’s defined in the mind of God.
Fr. Philip LeMasters
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
Christians must show true compassion toward people who struggle with gender identity without encouraging them to adopt self-definitions that ignore the physical realities of human personhood. Christ invites us to the healing of every dimension of our humanity, which includes embracing the truth about who we are as embodied male or female persons. For all of us, that is a struggle in one way or another. Healing comes through the difficult task of offering every dimension of our lives to the Lord in humility.
Archpriest Pavel Gumerov
Rating: 9,7|Votes: 6
The first conversation in the cycle is devoted to problems that young men and women ask themselves as they consider marriage: what is the purpose of marriage from the point of view of a Christian, how to choose a partner in life, whether to blindly succumb to the feeling of infatuation, whether they should necessarily get married, and whether marriage with the heterodox and others is possible for an Orthodox Christian.
Rating: 8|Votes: 1
That Christ accomplished our salvation in His Person with the cooperation of His divine and human natures shows us that in order for us to receive that gift it must involve God and man—we have our part to play. This is, of course, the Orthodox doctrine of synergy, which leads us to the theme of thirsting. God offers us the water of eternal life—but we must thirst for it. He will never force it upon us.