No Other Foundation

One might imagine that the very first words of the Orthodox Liturgy consisted of a blessing pronounced by the priest saying, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!” It is not so. The very first words of the Liturgy consist not of a blessing by the priest but of an observation by the deacon. He turns to the priest and says, “It is time for th...

In 2010 country singer Miranda Lambert recorded and released a song written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin entitled “The House that Built Me”. It was a clever song as well as a moving one, playing on the notion that we build houses; houses do not build us. The point of the song, however, was that the house the singer once lived in did build her— i.e. it was responsible for th...

I have just finished reading the excellent and admirably honest autobiography of Anthony Hopkins entitled We Did OK, Kid. Hopkins seems to have been (he is still alive) one of those people who grew wiser, better, and kinder with age. Throughout the book, however, I thought I could discern a life suffused with loneliness and sadness.

When I was a young man and a new teenage convert to the Christian Faith through the Jesus People movement I believed whatever I read in a book as long as it was written by someone with letters after their name. Yep: I was that dumb. And so when I first read an article written by S.G.F. Brandon saying that Jesus was a Zealot, I was shaken in my faith and thrown for a loop. In my ...

Eva Mozes Kor was a Jewish girl, born in Romania to Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, the only Jewish residents in the area. She had three siblings, one of whom was her twin sister Miriam. Her parents and two older sisters were gassed in Auschwitz; she survived because, along with her twin sister, she was the subject of medical experiments that Josef Mengele was performing on twins the...