With this brief reflection the editors wish our readers a blessed and joyful feast of the Nativity of the Most-Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary.

Η Φλεγόμενη Βάτος – The Burning Bush

Liturgically in the Orthodox Church we address the Theotokos—Θεοτόκος, Богородица, Născătoare de Dumnezeu, “Birth-Giver of God” (Dei Genitrix in Latin)—not only as the Virgin Mary, but as the Ever-Virgin Mary: ἀειπάρθενος, приснодева, pururea fecioara.  

The ever-virginity of the Mother of God, iterated and reiterated times without number in the lex orandi of the Orthodox Church, thus comprises an indispensable element of our lex credendi. This is to say not only that the Theotokos remains ever-virgin before, during, and after giving birth to the God-man Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit without male intervention—the meaning of the three stars on her forehead and shoulders in her icons—but that it must be so. It cannot be otherwise. Her ever-virginity constitutes not only a dogmatic imperative, but first and foremost a scriptural imperative.

Scripturally, Mary and the Righteous Joseph the Betrothed could not possibly have gotten down to the business of sexual intercourse and having children after the pre-eternal God of the universe, Who called all things visible and invisible from non-existence into being, Who dwells in unapproachable light, Who walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Who spoke as the nameless and unnameable One-Who-Is (ὁ ὤν in His halo) from the burning bush, Who sits enthroned upon the cherubim, before Whom the seraphim cover their faces in holy fear as they fly back and forth crying aloud Holy! Holy! Holy! had come forth from her virginal womb as a newborn human child—her own Creator, cradled in her arms and suckling at her breasts—making her and her body “more honourable than the cherubim” and “more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim.” Read More

During the academic year 2016-17, I was continually reflecting on William A. Johnson’s concept of “reading communities” (Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities, 2010). Naturally, as a student of Patristics, I focused my attention on how this concept applies to communities in the early Church.  However, from July 31 until August 5 of this year, I participated in the annual Pappas Patristic Institute held at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline MA.  This was the second time I participated in the program, after attending in 2015, but missing 2016.  This year I left with a greater appreciation not only for how “reading communities” function, but also for the vital role of the shared reading of texts both in the life of the Church and in the spiritual development of my soul.

In order for a reading community to materialize, the group must share some common beliefs about the texts being read.  In particular, the community must have a common belief about what texts are important to read, why those texts are important to read, and how those texts function to create a sense of communal identity (Johnson, 12-16). 

The Pappas Patristic Institute possesses all those characteristics.  All the participants share a common belief that the Church Fathers are important to read.  We also share a common belief that the Fathers are important to read because, as the foundations of the Christian tradition, they continue to have relevance and meaning for today.  Read More

I am an ordained Churches of Christ* minister in Australia who has experienced engagement with refugee resettlement and advocacy over the most part of four decades. Various congregations I have served have led the housing, equipping, and orientation of families from Vietnam, Laos, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have befriended those whose faith backgrounds have been Buddhist, Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic.  Where possible and appropriate, we have eventually been able to refer families and individuals to their own faith communities.

This ministry—which only nibbles at the edge of the growing world refugee crisis—is necessarily ecumenical, pooling the resources of churches through the Australian National Council of Churches and what is now its National Refugee Task Force. A number of Eastern Christian Churches are represented on the Council: the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Indian Orthodox Church, the Mar Thoma Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the Syrian Orthodox Church. [Editors’ note: Notably absent from the list is the Russian Orthodox Church’s Australian and New Zealand Diocese.] Read More

This thoughtful but somewhat cryptic essay draws attention to an issue that many feel is insufficiently acknowledged, often swept under the carpet: the pastoral malfeasance and psychic harm that many experience at the hands of the mother they love—the Church.

Theodore Lidz was an American psychiatrist who did his most compelling work in the field of schizophrenia in the 1950s and 1960s. What made Lidz’s research especially compelling was that he postulated that the primary causal factor of a mind that had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was the familial environment in which this mind was reared. If he saw the early signs of schizophrenia in a person young enough, he would explore the collective psychic environment of the family unit. Although he didn’t introduce the term, Lidz took the idea of the “schizophrenogenic mother” and spent decades explicating and exploring the concept.

This schizophrenogenic mother—meaning “the mother who births a split mind”—had two primary characteristics: the first was that she showed signs of being both deeply disturbed as well as difficult and unengaging; the second was that she projected exaggeratedly limiting beliefs onto her children and even her spouse, and she only felt safe when their behavior and self-conception (ego) matched her own flawed conception of them, because it was within those waters that she felt safest to navigate.

Lidz refused to label schizophrenia as a permanent mental illness because he considered it to be a reactive state of the mind caused by needing to subsist in a psychically unhealthy environment. Further, he believed that this reactive state of mind could be healed.

More importantly, however, Lidz also refused to demonize these schizophrenogenic mothers, insisting that more care and energy go into the healing of the family unit together rather than isolating psyches and feeding them neurochemical reactors. Many of Lidz’s ideas achieved mainstream consideration within the psychiatric community, but were quickly dismissed as the field evolved to accept neurobiological imbalances as the primary factor in explaining mental illness. Read More