Entries Tagged as ‘monasticism’

21 September 2009

Holy Places–Thin Places

Recently Bishop Seraphim Sigrist posted some pictures of Radonezh in Russia on his blog, and asked his readers to suggest what might be the spiritual heartland of their own country. Radonezh is where St Sergius of Radonezh established his monastery at the time that the Russians were resisting Tatar imperialism, and so it is of [...]

7 June 2009

Amahoro: cultural imperialism

Roger Saner posted a couple of interesting pieces on his blog recently in preparation for the Amahoro Gathering this week, and for a while it looked as though there would be some interesting conversation, but now it unfortunately seems to have fizzled out.
In a comment on another post Roger said:
Brian McLaren is currently in Canada, [...]

1 June 2009

Why the old monasticism is growing

There’s quite a lot of talk of the “new monasticism”, but the old monasticism still has its attractions.
Why Religious Orders Flourish: The Political Housewyf:
The article that the Opinionated Catholic cited talks about a religious order of an entirely different character than those my local paper prefers to highlight. Like many other orders going back [...]

31 May 2009

God’s ass

 Today we went to the Monastery of the Descent of the Holy Spirit for the Readers Service, but there was nobody there, as Fr Elias had celebrated the Divine Liturgy the previous day, and Nikhon the Reader was ill.
Then Evgenia came, and said she would join us, and while we were waiting for her to [...]

16 November 2008

Ostrov (The Island) — film

At my daughter’s recommendation my wife bought the DVD of the film Ostrov, and last night we watched it. There’s a description of the film and a plot summary on Wikipedia but you really need to see  the film to appreciate it.
Though the film is fictional, it captures the spirit of Orthodox monasticism better than [...]

8 March 2008

Call for papers: Synchroblog on New Monasticism

The theme of the March Synchroblog is the New Monasticism.
Phil Wyman writes
Seeing this is month of both St. David’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day – New Monasticism is an appropriate topic for this month’s SynchroBlog as was suggested by Steve Hayes from South Africa.Let me know if you are interested in adding [...]

4 March 2008

The unexpected monks

We’ve been talking about having a synchroblog on the new monasticism, and suddenly it seems to be popping up all over the place. Hat-tip to Paul Grabill for this link. Paul says:
Having graduated high school in 1972, I was old enough to enjoy the long-distance fruit of the Jesus People Movement (including being a regular [...]

4 March 2008

Desert Calling

ICXC|NIKA writes

Desert Calling is an Orthodox web forum started by Isaak (Dust and Ashes) not long ago devoted to building a community of Orthodox Christians based in askesis, the struggle against and death to the world in order that we might obtain the Holy Spirit of Peace. Its membership has boomed in a way we [...]

29 February 2008

New monasticism meets old

This morning I went to hear Roger Saner speaking about the new monasticism at the Seattle Coffee Shop in Brooklyn Mall.
Roger and I have been reading each other’s blogs for about a year now, and when I heard he would be speaking less than 8 km from where I live, it seemed a good opportunity [...]

19 February 2008

A monastic vision

In his blog Koinonia Fr Gregory Jensen makes An Immodest Proposal for a restoration of monasticism, as key to the renewal of the spiritual life of the Christian community. This in turn would be the key to the reevangelisation of Western Europe, as Eastern Europe needed to be reevangelised in the 1990s.
Many Protestants are [...]