Rating: 2|Votes: 1

Fr. Feodor Konyukhov and the "Ark of the Covenant" Ethiopian Expedition

"The tribe is believed to be one of the most willful and scofflaw. The situation here became more complicated after a number of wars, which left people with many firearms—mostly our Kalashnikov rifles." Nevertheless, the travelers have been given a most gracious welcome, expressed in the local tradition of the kissing of hands, even by gun-toting men.

Rating: 9,6|Votes: 8

Many Confess, But Few Repent

Monk Moses of the Holy Mountain

Repentance is a freely-willed, internally cultivated process of contrition and sorrow for having distanced ourselves from God through sin. True repentance has nothing to do with intolerable pain, excessive sorrow and relentless guilty feelings. That would not be sincere repentance, but a secret egotism, a feeling of our “ego” being trampled on; an anger that is directed at our self, which then wreaks revenge because it is exposing itself and is put to shame—a thing that it cannot tolerate.

Mid-Lent

In reverent awe before the live-creating Cross and calling us to fall down before it, the Church calls out in this fourth week of Great Lent, saying, "This holy and light-bearing week offers to the world the honorable Cross: come, fall down with fear and love.

Rating: 10|Votes: 2

Sunday of the Cross

Archbishop Dmitri (Royster)

The Cross is our badge and emblem as Christians. Remove the Cross from our lives and we have nothing. Without the Cross, both in Christ’s life and in ours, there is no genuine Christianity and consequently, no reason to observe Lent or any other sacred season. This fact may seem self-evident. Yet ours is a time in which words like sin, repentance, sacrifice, the Cross and crucifixion, are misunderstood, being viewed even by some Christians with suspicion, as "negative" terms, at least when applied to our own lives.

Rating: 10|Votes: 1

Advice to a Former Occultist Whose Friends Are Still Involved

Hieromonk Job (Gumerov)

Man's corruptness consists in the mixture of goodness and evil in him; the fallen spirits' corruptness consists in their total evil, and complete absence of goodness. The fallen spirits' abilities are far superior to those of fallen men, whose intentions are restrained by the very weight and corpulence of their bodies. Demons freely and quickly flow through the universe, and freely do things that are quite impossible for man to do.