One of the stories we read in the book group earlier this fall was titled “Parker’s Back” by Flannery O’Connor. The main character in the story, O.E. Parker, is a tattooed, shiftless, good-for-nothing who, through a burning bush-like epiphany, becomes a sort of Moses. The other main character is his wife, Sarah Ruth, whose father is a preacher and who seems to loathe Parker more than she loves him. She hates his tattoos, his worldliness, and Parker suspects that she stays wit

Friends, the following is an excerpt from a book titled The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clément. This book was very helpful for me as I was exploring the Orthodox Church and Tradition some twenty years ago and I continue to find it a wonderful synthesis of spiritual and patristic wisdom that I return to again and again. -Fr John The Ecclesia, the Church, is not primarily or fundamentally the concern of sociology. The institution is merely the visible aspect of th

Friends, the following is an excerpt from a book titled The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clément. This book was very helpful for me as I was exploring the Orthodox Church and Tradition some twenty years ago and I continue to find it a wonderful synthesis of spiritual and patristic wisdom that I return to again and again. -Fr John The ancient Greeks, to symbolize a true meeting, used to use a split ring whose two separate halves were joined together again. In Chris