Revelation Class 12 – The Trumpets 22 January 2025 Revelation, Chapter Eight - Eleven 

Patrick Henry Reardon, Revelation: A Liturgical Prophecy (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 58–69.

In the present text, the immediate response to the opening of the seventh seal is silence in heaven for thirty minutes (verse 1), while the angels with the seven trumpets prepare themselves (vers...

On Gratitude (with thanks to St. Nicholai Velimirovich) Luke 17: 12-19 (The Ten Lepers, only one of whom returned)

[Start with a meditation on the virtues of hard work and gratitude; hard work so that we can be proud of what we have done and foster an appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into the making and sustaining of things. This makes us grateful for what we have, and especially ...

Homily: Holiness Changes Everything (Sunday after Theophany) Ephesians 4: 7-13 St. Matthew 4: 12-17 

Review/Introduction. 

Ontology of Beauty.  Designed to provide a deeper appreciation for our faith and to demonstrate the blindness of materialism (to include the “new atheists”).  When materialists describe our appreciation for beauty, they either try to show how an appreciation for beauty somehow...

The Sunday before Theophany On Repentance and Its Relationship to Beauty and Love 2 Timothy 4: 5-8;  St. Mark 1: 1-8

“Behold, I will send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight;”

After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and...

Matthew 2: 13-23 (The Slaughter of the Innocents) Herod (and us): from temptation to possession

Five Steps of Sin

1. The temptation (logismoi) occurs.  We are NOT accountable for this.
2. Interaction with the thought – what are the options?  What would it look like?  In his summary of Orthodox Spirituality in Mountain of Silence,  Fr. Maximos (now Mp. Athanasios of Limassol) says that this is not sin, ...

Sunday before the Nativity Hebrews 11:9-10,17-23,32-40 St. Matthew 1:1-25

After giving a refresher on motivated reasoning, Fr. Anthony notes how much context affects what we think about our ancestors from the genealogy of Christ.  He then encourages us to tip the scales of our judgment so that we are more charitable towards people/things we are inclined to dislike, more skeptical towards people/th...

Today Fr. Anthony uses the simple theory of reading (word recognition x decoding -> reading comprehension) to talk about chanting and why it is so difficult for those new to Byzantine chant to learn it (because they do not have the equivalent of word recognition), especially if they cannot read music (because they have neither the equivalent of word recognition nor the ability to decode).  Enjoy t...