An Orthodox Christian priest wrote an anonymous letter trying to justify how secular expediency aids sacred faith with regards to COVID-19, with the best and most reasoned approach we have yet seen. Nevertheless, his well-intentioned letter stumbles on Christ’s Gospel, because it tries to incorporate secular knowledge as beneficial when it is not. We will attempt to explain how this is so.
This may be yet another example of how YouTube practices a type of censorship that does NOT involve removing “objectionable” material, but perhaps simply prevents any propagation of material that goes against the gospel of this world. Father Peter Heers delievers a stunning translation of a letter written in April of this year by one of the Athonite elders, who broke his silence to make clear the difference between his own point of view about the coronavirus pandemic and what is being attributed to him, often thoughts that he does not hold at
The title of this newspiece is actually tamed from what it probably should be.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been on the rise since the fall of Communism in 1991. The country has been opening new parishes at the rate of two to three per day. This new Cathedral of the Armed Forces, built at a military theme park outside Moscow, is one of the largest Christian edifices in Russia, and hence one of the largest Orthodox Christian cathedrals on the planet.
Dr Steve Turley gives a phenomenal explanation of the building and more importantly, delves into Orthodox Christian cosmology, which is unique among all Christian confessions.
When starting this series, we fully expected to find really strong arguments supporting the position taken by most Orthodox Christian Church jurisdictions – that the parish temples be closed to laity during the period of quarantine imposed on most of us in the “First World” (Europe, the Americas, China, Australia, the Far East) by the coronavirus and COVID-19 mitigation efforts.
In part I of this series, we began to examine the present issue of Church closures in the West – Europe and the United States in particular, in response to the coronavirus pandemic and its accompanying illness, COVID-19. We tried to detach the hysteria and hype from this, and rather than make it a screed about the intrusion of the Dark Side upon the religious Christian right, we wanted to test current events against the following questions:
One of the most peculiar characteristics of the coronavirus pandemic and its effect on all of us is the massive campaign of social distancing that has led to the closures of churches or “skeleton crew” Christian religious services currently being practiced all across the world.
I guess this is taking “don’t panic!” to its ultimate end. In a severely distasteful move, Congressional Democrat members tried to attach irrelevant riders to the latest coronavirus relief bill, apparently making use of Rahm Emmanuel’s philosophy, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” As a result the bill is presently deadlocked in Congress, even as the number of COVID-19 cases in the US has become the third highest in the world.
Dr Steven Turley really explains the insanity of this latest partisan play by the Democrats in a simply must-watch video, here below:
Our faith has not been in God, but in ourselves and our supposedly mighty civilization. But now, COVID-19 is showing us how mighty that civilization really is. Patriarch Kirill spoke on this topic today in his sermon in Moscow.
This is translated from patriarchia.ru for our English-speaking readers.
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We return to our series on Orthodox Christianity versus Socialism with a look back at the three previous Articles. In our first installment we examined the basic matter of materialism (not to be punny), noting that Socialism is completely different in its worldview, treating matter itself as the only creative energy or force, and emphasizing a point of view that nothing exists beyond the material world.
