No Longer Sola

So we decided to go visit some friends of ours from church yesterday. They're lovely people, our kids are friends, they're going to be Christine's godparents, etc. We just have a great connection with them. It had already been a super long morning and the weather was getting ominously worse and worse as we drove to their house. We were running late and they were waiting on us to eat lunch, so I was already feeling a bit bad about the whole situation. And then Iakabos miss

I left Lutheranism for Orthodoxy at an interesting time. I’m hardly the first pastor or layperson to leave the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod for Orthodoxy. This made my journey and investigation interesting because I got to hear, for years, the rebuttals from prominent Lutheran pastors like Will Weedon, Todd Wilken and John Pless. There are two key things that were typically brought up to help distressed Lutherans like me realize that they don’t want to abandon ship. The f

Happy Friday! I wanted to share this cool resource with you guys. You'll remember that a little over a month ago we made a short pilgrimage to a Western Rite Benedictine Orthodox Monastery. Brother Lazarus had alluded to a forthcoming documentary about the monastery and... it was released TODAY! I really enjoyed it; it's a great documentary about the Western rite. If your liturgical heritage is Lutheran, Catholic, Episcopalian, etc... then this is may certainly be of inte

Semper Virgo is like a middle-of-the-night Charley horse for modern Lutheranism. You’re sleeping peacefully and then all of a sudden you’re woken up by an innocuous, yet painful, reality. And the more you toss and turn the tighter it seems to grab you. Semper Virgo (SV) refers to the historic Christian teaching on the perpetual virginity of Mary. In the Orthodox Church we pray multiple times during liturgy the following petition that expresses this belief: Commemorating our

I know, I know... by this time of year most people are weary from school, ready for summer break, finishing end of year projects and waiting to be done. But I'm just on a different wavelength! We do school through the summer, which is helpful as a home school family as big and as complex as ours, because it gives us three months of extra wiggle room to get everything done! And we'll definitely be using that wiggle room this year. It also means that we are gearing up for th

Anyone who knows me knows that I have an undying love for the St. Louis Cardinals. The new season has begun, and I have been thoroughly enjoying the games. Unfortunately, last night's game between the Cardinals and the Brewers got me into a bit of hot water - and no it's not because I should have been doing the dishes. During the bottom of the third inning the announcers chatted with Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright (one of my favorite players) for an extended time on somet