A World of Speculation

Blogging advice

Salon blogger Dave Pollard tells what it takes to build a blog in “The Top Five Ways to Improve Your Blog” and “The Five Top Ways to Attract More Attention to It.” Here are the tips for improvement, stripped of their explanatory material:...

‘What is a friend anyway?’

Ze Frank asks this question along with other penetrating observations in his online video “small world” that satirizes online “friends” networks. He raises good questions about exclusivity and how friends prove themselves. But don’t miss...

What’s all this about Romanians?

I know a few Romanians here in Portland. They’re normal, decent people who make delicious cabbage rolls and a polenta that will knock your socks off. But over the past year or so, I’ve read two horror novels (don’t ask) in which the...

Mother Maria Skobtsova

Our priest gave a sermon yesterday on Mother Maria Skobtsova, cigarette-smoking nun, poet, former Bolshevik and martyr of the Nazi yoke. When she became a nun, her bishop gave her a unique charge: that the world would be her monastery. She opened her home to every...

Kursk Root Icon of Our Lady of the Sign

Fellow blogger Douglas tells me that the Kursk Root Icon of Our Lady of the Sign is on display in Minneapolis-St. Paul. I’ve been Orthodox 14 years this Pascha, but I’ve spent my life in a remote backwater of the Orthodox world and have never been to see a...