A World of Speculation

Orthodox radio on the Web

I love Incarnation Broadcast Network, which is why it’s so maddening that it’s so charmingly wonky. (I listen by way of Live 365.) A Liturgy in fine Byzantine chant is interrupted suddenly by a whiney-voiced woman giving an honestly inspiring reflection...

Emigres and immigrants

In his New York Times piece titled A Russian Émigré Finally Gets His Russian Passport, Serge Schmemann tells about his uncle’s receipt of a Russian passport after decades of living as an emigre in France. Serge (I guess I can call him Serge, since he gave my...

Manalive

Just finished reading G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, a story about the pursuit of joy. Innocent Smith is a man with two legs, who discovered in college the truth behind the pessimistic philosphies of pre-World War I England: that the professors could talk...

Bravo!

We’ve had this discussion in our parish and have come down on the side of a reserved and thoughtful silence. Once, somebody gave a gift to our matusha, a woman who deserves our respect and, yes, applause, if anyone does. But people talked to the priest about it....

I am such a geek

I spent hours last night updating to OSX, moving my files from the System 9 documents to System 10 documents folder, discovering the joys of the OSX browser, Safari (I haven’t ever read the well-known Little Green Footballs weblog because it took too long to...

Is music more culturally translatable than humor?

I think so. A Ethiopian man, Haile Amde Haymanot, signed the guest book over at the Onion Dome thus: besime ab, weweld, wemenfes qidus; ahadu amlak; Amen! Hello there! Yes, the Orthodox might not be laughing about themselves… It’s because we take our...