Partisan politics has no place in the life and mission of the church.  This advice is not popular in a day when politics is tantamount to religious belief.  There are  people who take more seriously their political views than God Himself.  Is this an exaggeration?  It is not if one…

A society without God is unsatisfactory and inadequate to the point of nightmarish.  As proof, we only need to examine–no need to look very closely–the condition of American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  We have sunk to the depths in moral standing and are perplexed by the…

Recently, I finished a novel entitled Adriel Peregrine to be released on July 23 by Atmosphere Press.  It is the second novel I’ve written, the first being The Light in the Ruins.  Adriel Peregrine is about a young man, raised to be a Christian, who wanders off the Way.  Because…

In Eastern Orthodox iconography,  the bones of the first man, Adam, are depicted as buried at the foot of the cross.  The blood of the crucified Christ is pouring down on them.  In this scene the redemption of humanity is shown as reversing sin and death that began with Adam. …

The word, barbarian, comes from the Greek, imitative of the Hellenic perception of what other languages sound like.  It has an original reference to the less civilized or uncivilized peoples with whom Greeks and Romans had contact. Who are the barbarians today?  Were they not assimilated into the Roman world…

Each one of us has very limited knowledge.  Even the most knowledgeable teacher or professor is not and cannot be a polymath–a person of much learning in all areas.   There is too great a body of knowledge for any one person to have a solid grasp on all of it. …

Dogma is a dirty word to be classed with all the dirty words in the language.  Even more unacceptable is the word, dogmatism, having nothing but a negative meaning in its common use.  Dogma is a wraith compared with the unique infleshness  (Incarnation) of Jesus Christ.  Dogma is disembodied abstraction;…

The last body of teachings of Jesus is found in Matthew 24 and 25 that concern the end of  the world and the last judgment.  In Chapter 24 Christ recounts the events of the end time, and in Chapter 25 He tells three parables pertaining to our readiness to meet…

We now move to the fourth section of teaching material in the Gospel of Matthew.  Chapter 18 contains teachings about the forgiveness of sin. At the beginning of His ministry, Jesus announces His message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  Through Christ comes the invitation to repentance…

Some questions are never answered; thus, the philosophic speculation since the time of the early Ionian Greek thinkers of the sixth century B.C.  Thales is regarded as the first one of these intellectuals and as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.  He thought that all things originated out…