with Stephen Brannen
The Propers of the Office and Mass for the majority of Sundays and Feast days in the West are remarkably conservative in that most of them are direct quotations from Scripture. Later monastic and ecclesiastical poetry is not foreign to the services, however, and is always sprinkled throughout them. Here, for instance, is a sampling of extra-biblical poetry and prayers in the Propers for the Feast of the Annunciation: Continue reading “Some Propers for the Feast of The Annunciation”
In the first decades of the Church, Christians (both in Jerusalem and the cities where the Apostles preached) would have used essentially the same liturgical form of worship. Over time, as the Church grew to include various people groups and their languages, the original Eucharistic service from Jerusalem was developed and adorned by those various peoples according to their unique musical and artistic expressions, poetic traditions, and senses of beauty, dignity, and piety. Continue reading “Comparing the Liturgies of East and West”
“Congregations and parishes, or larger administrative units, may be received…and be permitted to retain and use all such Western liturgical rites, devotional practices and customs that are not contrary to the Orthodox faith and are logically derived from a Western usage antedating the Papal schism of the eleventh century.” This is from the 1958 Western Rite edict of Metropolitan Antony of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America. Continue reading “A Reasonable Philosophy for the Western Rite”
My birthday is on February 14th. Any time I tell someone that, they immediately remark about how that’s Valentine’s Day. “Oooh, a Valentine baby!” “Do you get birthday presents and valentines?!” “Wow, is that weird having your birthday on Valentine’s Day?” It’s only weird when I have to field questions like those. Continue reading “St. Valentine, St. Patrick, and Joe Schmo”
When we’re first born into this world, the whole content of the world for us is simply our parents’ love: their voices in our ears, our rocking back and forth in their arms, locking eyes with them and reciprocating smiles. Soon the world broadens into proprioception, new sensations, and the discovery of objects around us. Before long we have a sense of ourselves as distinct selves in the world, and that world continues growing larger, populated with other selves, with animals and places and even ideas and concepts. In school, the world starts being divided up into “subjects,” and we learn to categorize what’s around us. Stories and experiences trigger our imaginations to fill in details, invent new scenarios, and conjecture about what reality might be like. Curiosity and imagination drive us to continue learning about the world as we grow up.