Alexander Parmenov
Some of our readers have heard of the distant village of Zharki, located deep in Ivanovo Province in Russia. This was where Hieromonk Nestor served, who foreknew his own death at the hands of local icon thieves. Fr. Victor Saltykov, Hieromonk Joachim in monastic tonsure, served as a deacon with Fr. Nestor.
Archimandrite John (Krestiankin)
The Sign of the Cross is the only seal that has spiritual power. Our cross-bearing, our struggle with sin, our endurance of sickness, anguish, co-suffering with others, and much more—life according to God—is a witness to the fact that we bear God’s seal on ourselves. What is technology, computers, someone’s human or even diabolical desire to make us submit to his influence, to his seal? Nothing compared to that great seal which the Savior has given us for salvation.
Archpriest Eugene Grushetsky
Then Darwin said that a new species could appear in a million years. But his statement was an intellectual exercise, a mere extrapolation and guesswork. In his youth he studied theology at Cambridge to become a clergyman; and he certainly read the Bible, which correctly describes the creation of the world in the right order: light, plants, fish, birds, mammals and man. The prophet Moses described all this in in the book of Genesis around the thirteenth century B.C., and thirty-two centuries before Darwin! So Darwin learned all this in the Bible—and then began to explain that everything had evolved by itself.
The seal of antichrist will come when antichrist comes to reign and receives power, and becomes the one and only ruler on the earth. Right now every nation has its own head. Therefore, do not panic before the time, but fear now the sins that open and pave the way to the future antichrist.
Mother Sergia (Starkova)
I was born in 1982, and in the late 1990s spiritual books started appearing; I read Abba Dorotheos, St. John Climacus, and delighted in the asceticism of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Thus, you could say, my monastic life began while I was still at home: A flame was lit in my heart of zeal for God. I was drawn by another, non-secular, life—the monastic life.