St. John of Kronstadt
Rating: 5,5|Votes: 2
This is what it means to possess all things. Truly, having nothing on earth and no passionate attachment to anything earthly, the Apostles possessed everything—all spiritual riches, all spiritual power; all spiritual consolation. They counted everything earthly as rubbish, dust, and vanishing smoke, because they had God Himself living in them, working countless miracles through them and saving through them a countless multitude of people.
Rating: 9,1|Votes: 16
In the words of St. Simeon of Thessalonica, “The forty days of the Nativity fast is an image of the fast of Moses, who having fasted for forty days and forty nights, received the words of God inscribed on stone tablets. But having fasted for forty days, we gaze upon and receive the living Word from the Virgin, inscribed not on stones, but incarnate and born, and we partake of His Divine flesh.”
Anton Leontev
“Now many conferences and international meetings are taking place, but no practical measures are being taken at all. If everyone condemns the violence, then why is it continuing against Christians nearly every day? Could the criminals really be stronger than the entire international community?” he wondered.
Rating: 10|Votes: 5
Introducing herself, the saint confessed her faith in the One True God and with wisdom exposed the errors of the pagans. The beauty of the maiden captivated the emperor. In order to convince her and to show the superiority of pagan wisdom, the emperor ordered fifty of the most learned philosophers and rhetoricians of the Empire to dispute with her, but the saint got the better of the wise men, so that they came to believe in Christ themselves.
Deacon George Maximov
Rating: 10|Votes: 12
Only standing upon the above-mentioned axioms is it possible, without noticing the entire absurdity of such a combination, to consider ourselves believing Christians and yet suppose that we know better what the Virgin Mary did and didn't do than the Christians of the second century, than Sts. Herman and Tarasius of Constantinople, St. Gregory Palamas, and others who wrote about these events as facts; and finally, better than the Church herself, which instituted this feast.
