Remembrance Day
In the USA, it’s Veterans Day, when those, both living and dead, who have served in the Armed Forces are honoured, but in my country, Canada, this day is our Remembrance Day, when we commemorate those who gave their lives in war to protect and preserve the innocent and the...
Top 5 Destinations for Orthodox Jet-Setters
Jet set—it’s an old fashioned, 1960s term for those who had money to burn and could just hop on a plane and travel wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and stay for however long they wanted. It implied a rootless, aimless, pleasure-driven existence that had no purpose except to amuse...
Book Review: Shepherding Sam
Saucer is a Corgi, and anyone who know anything about Corgis knows that they’re herders. They’ve been helping herd flocks for almost as long as there have been flocks and herds. And Saucer knows it. So when he arrives at the monastery, the first thing he does is look for...
Faith and Fantasy: Exploring Doxacon Seattle 2016
If I asked you what Vespers and Harry Potter have in common, you might wonder if that isn’t a “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” kind of question. Why would the Orthodox faith have anything at all in common with speculative fiction? In a word: Doxacon. It’s the...
Cherishing the Moments of Marriage
The more you do it the harder it gets. That goes against everything we’re taught. If you want to be good at something, keep doing it, and it will get easier the more you do it. And when we’re talking about baseball, about piano, about dancing, about almost anything to...
Book Review: When God Made You
It’s both heartening and a source of pride that in a time when writers and editors are calling for more diverse books in children’s literature, an Orthodox writer and illustrator don’t just step up to the plate, they hit an out of the park home run. It’s also a delight...
A Right to Die?
A woman in Holland, suffering from severe PTSD because of childhood sexual abuse is put to death – euthanized – because doctors decide her condition is incurable, in spite of intensive therapy making positive differences in her illness. In 2014, Belgium became the first country in the world to allow...
Waiting and Being
It’s Holy Week, and my cat is dying. She is old, older than we had thought, and her kidneys are diseased. Other than alleviating her symptoms, there is nothing we can do. There is no cure for this. So we hydrate her, feed her, pet her, cuddle her, love her,...
The Pascha Basket
When I was a child, growing up in a secular home in Toronto, Ontario, I loved my Easter basket. It held that plastic fake grass in the pastel colours, and while my parents never indulged in the “Easter egg hunt” that’s such a solid tradition in the rest of the...
Commemorating the Repentance of St. Mary of Egypt
She was born in Egypt, in about 466 AD, to Christian parents. At the age of 12, she ran away from home to Alexandria, where she lived on the street, giving away her favours and spinning flax to feed herself. She loved a good party and her endless capacity for...
Why We Celebrate Three Hierarchs
St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John Chrysostom – the three Holy Hierarchs. We celebrate their feast day today, the 30th of January, but why? Each of them has their own day, when we celebrate their lives and contributions to our Orthodox faith. But what did...
Saint Raphael of Brooklyn
Sometimes there seems to be a saint who doesn’t really stand out, believe it or not. They are laborers in God’s vineyard, and their ‘claim to fame’ is for something other than what they’ve done. They just seem to have been in the right place at the right time. At...
