I feel like a broken record.

Every Fall my priest gives a series of lectures on a theme of his choosing in which participants read assigned fiction, church fathers, bible commentary, etc. This Falls' Theological Seminar is on community.

I wasn't at this past Wednesday's lecture. I've never been to one. Motherhood keeps me busy on Wednesday nights. ( Read more... )

Father Stephen has a couple of blog posts up about the particular nature of love and salvation.  In one post, he writes:
This is always the test of love (not do I love man, but do I love this man).

And in another,

I have yet to meet a human being who lived life in general. God did not become man - as St. Theodore the Studite famously put it, “God ( Read more... )

My food philosophy is rather simple:

Eat food. Not too much.

But, what do I mean by "food"?  That's the kicker.  To help me determine the difference between food and what I call "edible food-like substances," I use a couple of rules of thumb.

1.  Eat foods in their natural, God-given forms.  The more we process, break down, refine, and manufacture our ( Read more... )

When I was a teenager, I had a premonition that I wouldn't live to see 30.  I sincerely believed it right up through about the second year of my marriage.  By then, the desire to grow old with Steve and have a family overpowered the weight of the premonition and I officially began believing my premonition had been a bunch of hooey.  But for a good ( Read more... )

Keeping a clean kitchen sink -- silly as it sounds -- actually inspires!  It practically cleans the whole kitchen all by itself.  To have a clean kitchen sink requires putting dirty dishes somewhere.  The dishwasher is a natural choice.  Hence, clean dishes have to be put immediately away. Having a clean sink inspires a clean countertop and stove ( Read more... )

Listening to Ancient Faith Talk Radio today, I heard a podcast from Fr. Stephen.  I love reading his blog, and I enjoyed his podcast, too.  Now that I've drawn from the well of his wisdom, I'll try and summarize the points that struck me:

First, Christ didn't come to make good men better, but to make dead men live.  Sin works death in us.  Christ ( Read more... )

Every moment of the day yesterday -- from waking until going to bed -- seemed to be filled with prescribed activities.  One important Thing To Do after another passed hurriedly by.  After breakfast, I picked up milk from the local raw milk rancher, ate lunch, gave Alex a hearty farewell as he embarked on his journey from Austin to Oregon via Baja ( Read more... )

Yesterday, the self-conscious side of me kicked in. I looked at my journal with the eyes of an outsider and realized how little of it lived up to its name. Names mean things, after all. And I put a lot of care and thought into the name of this journal.

The title comes, of course, from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry.  But the meaning I insert into ( Read more... )

This afternoon I have an important client meeting.  I'm expecting to do about $4,000 of business for them over the next two months, so I'm hoping to make a favorable impression.  The meeting is far, far away.  I'll probably spend about 2 hours driving to and from an hour-long meeting.  I hope it goes well ( Read more... )

Earlier tonight as I drove Alex to our house after Vespers, I noticed the low, gigantic, deep orange moon perched in the sky just above the horizon.  Now, as I type these words and look out our kitchen window through the trees, I see a bright white, smallish circle in the night sky.  In just two hours it has changed so much.

Today I listened to ( Read more... )