The line “remember your training“ has entered our culture through a series of mostly cheesy action movies. The phrase is intended as an instruction to soldiers that they should not lose their head in the heat of battle but remember their training, which - theoretically - should help them survive. There’s just one problem with this: if you have to actually remember your training then you haven’t been trained very well. If, for example, in the heat of battle you have to stop an

I was getting gas the other day and at the pump next to me was a church van from a Protestant church in town. Painted beneath the name of the church on the side of the van was their motto: “church the way it used to be”. Now, Orthodox Christians are well aware of the irony here. “The way it used to be”, in this case, means a period of only about a century or so in a small corner of Protestant Christianity in America. The apparent appeal to history and tradition here – “the wa

The churches in this part of the world are so thick that if you throw a rock in any direction you are likely to hit one. And with all of these churches it is difficult for one little church to stand out. This makes, as you have no doubt witnessed, for some interesting and attention-grabbing church signage. I was driving in southern Missouri a few years back when I noticed - not for the first time - one such sign. Beneath the name of the church it read: “An imperfect church fo

At the end of several of Saint Paul’s epistles we find what scholars sometimes called the “household code”. These are the instructions that he gives to husbands, wives, children, and servants regarding their relationships with one another or, in the case of servants, with their masters. Here is an example from Ephesians: "Bondservants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ; not with eyese