My meditations as I join the saints of all ages on the journey toward union with God and Christlikeness.
On the Theotokos
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I have struggled with formatting in Blogger long enough. So going forward my posts will just be a link to a Google Doc that has the content of my meditations. Today I want to share these meditations: On the Theotokos.
Introduction Prayer is an important aspect of the apostolic deposit once delivered to the saints (Jude 3). The apostles adapted for a Christian context the tradition they received from Second Temple Judaism and transmitted it in the deposit to their successors. This deposit included both the concepts of prayer at fixed hours and continuous prayer. The fixed hour aspect of prayer has evolved into the Christian daily office or "canonical hours of prayer". This paper will explore three things: the historical foundations for fixed-hour and continuous prayer as well as how they have been applied in Church history. Fixed Hour Prayers Although the patriarchs are never recorded as observing fixed-hour prayers, three different patriarchs are recorded to have interacted with Yahweh at three different times of the day, which taken together has provided fuel for the Jewish myth that each of them instituted one of the three fixed-hour prayers: Abraham, morning (Genesis 2...
The Fellowship of Intentional Communities defined intentional community this way: "A group of people who live together or share common facilities and who regularly associate with each other on the basis of explicit common values." I believe we need to form an Orthodox intentional community in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The reason is the synthesis and application of the answers to a series of increasingly specific questions as documented below: Why am I attracted to intentional community? I long to grow in the virtues of forgiveness, tolerance, love, commitment, grace, mercy, etc, but this only happens in community. Only in community can my narcissistic blindspots be challenged. For much of my life, my circumstances have required that I live alone, or effectively alone, and my interactions with people have been extremely compartmentalized. The result is that my growth in Christlikeness has been stagnant. It is a source of great sorrow for me. I might be naive, but...
Introduction Alexandria and Antioch were the second and third most important cities in the Roman empire after Rome. Not surprisingly they also became centers of Biblical exegesis and theology in the early centuries of the Church. Throughout the Christological controversies of the first five centuries, the two cities were like poles representing two different approaches to the questions at hand. At the heart of the matter was the place that Greek philosophy could play in theology. On the one hand the Church leaders in the West and Asia Minor (including Antioch) distrusted Greek philosophy because of their battle with Gnosticism; on the other hand Church leaders in Alexandria followed in the footsteps of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, who combined Plato and Judaism, by combining Plato and Christianity. This difference of approach combined with the simultaneous political rivalry for importance in the empire set the stage for a competition between the Alexandrian and Antiochia...
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