Vespers at St Sergius

Last night we went to Vespers and Matins at St Sergius Church in Midrand. It marked the tenth anniversary of the starting of the parish, and the fifth anniversary of the consecration of the church. Bishop Kirill of Smolensk, who had consecrated the church, was visiting, and the local Archbishop, Metropolitan Seraphim of Johannesburg and [...]

St Stalin?

A Russian priest has caused controversy by putting up an ikon depicting the Bolshevik dictator Stalin (hat-tip to Fr Milovan in Again and again):
One of the most widely covered stories in the Russian Federation this week concerns not the actions of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or even the impact of the [...]

Widdershins

“He turned to his right, knowing that is is unlucky to walk around a church widdershins, and followed the path close beneath the wall till he found himself standing by the west door”.
That sentence struck me as odd the first time I read it, in Dorothy Sayers’s novel The nine tailors a couple of years [...]

Christian responses to people suffering from HIV/Aids

This is old, but still worth reading.
His Beatitude Teoctist, Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church: A message, urging to love and tolerance for those suffering from AIDS/
HIV
Romania, 27 January 2004
Beloved brothers and sisters,
We are still at the beginning of the year, at a time when each one of us looks forward to the things he [...]

Children and religious belief

Some militant atheists have claimed that children are natural atheists, and that it is only adult indoctrination that makes them believe in God or gods. Here is a report of some research that appears to refute that contention:
Justin L Barrett: Do children believe because they’re told to by adults? The evidence suggests otherwise | Comment [...]

Sexual ethics?

Hat-tip to the Stroppy Rabbit for the link to this chart on religion and sexual ethics, and for providing a pagan view in addition to the original chart, which is said to have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in December 1994. It was compiled, according to them, “based on official reports and expert advice.”
It [...]

Beggars at robots

On the way to church this morning we listened to the radio. They were interviewing Wayne Minnaar, the head of the Joburg Metro Police, about the problem of beggars at robots. It’s illegal, the interviewer says, so why don’t the Metro Police do something about it. It’s not so easy says Wayne Minnaar. They are [...]

Still on line for now

In spite of the bandwidth warnings, my internet access hasn’t been cut yet — perthaps thanks to the “Noscript” add-on to Firefox that several people recommended, which seems to stop a lot of the bandwidth-hogging unsolicited videos that have become so common recently.
It’s probably too good to last, and to conserve bandwidth I’ll only be [...]

Bandwidth leachers

This may be my last blog post this month, because i just got a notice saying that I was running out of bandwidth, and unless my wife gets a fat bonus or something , we probably won’t be able to afford any more.
Our bandwidth usage seems to go up every month, and it seems that [...]

The ladder

Notes from a Common-place Book: Rudderless Christianity posts an interesting report from the Willow Creek Community Church, which I gather is an evangelical megachurch somewhere in the USA.
The most disturbing and widely publicized finding of “Reveal,” Willow Creek Community Church’s years-long exercise in consultant-directed self-analysis, was that a significant percentage of the members who have [...]