Saturday, May 31, 2008

Orthodox Christianity: Introduction - Part 1


Orthodox Christianity: Introduction - Part 1 of 2

About a dozen from the youth class of Merrimac United Methodist Church came to Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Mission recently to learn a little of other churches.

Fr John Brian condenses history and theology, doctrine and practice into about 45 minutes (in two parts)

Recorded at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Mission Chapel, May 28, 2008

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Part 2 of 2

http://frjohbrian.blogspot.com/2008/05/orthodox-christianity-introduction-part.html

Orthodox Christianity: Introduction - Part 2



Orthodox Christianity: Introduction - Part 2 of 2

About a dozen from the youth class of Merrimac United Methodist Church came to Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Mission recently to learn a little of other churches.

Fr John Brian condenses history and theology, doctrine and practice into about 45 minutes (in two parts)

Recorded at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Mission Chapel, May 28, 2008

PODCAST OR DOWNLOAD:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/frjohnbrian or
http://frjohnbrian.hipcast.com/rss/spiritual_reflections_or_fr_john_brian.xml

LISTEN ONLINE HERE:

part 1 of 2

http://frjohbrian.blogspot.com/2008/05/orthodox-christianity-introduction-part_31.html

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

a children's book!

From: Teresa Kochamma

Greetings, friends ... relatives ... church folks ... co-workers...

I'm sending this out to everyone I can think of that has young kids, or
grandkids, or nieces or nephews - well, anyone who enjoys a good story with
a spiritual message.

Fr. John-Brian has just published a children's book, "What the Grub Found
Out." Actually, he wrote and illustrated this book back in 1992. But now
through Lulu Press, he was able to publish it.

"What the Grub Found Out" can be can be purchased as a regular book for
$10.63, or downloaded on to your computer for $2.50. It makes a great gift
for little ones ... hint, hint. ;)

http://stores.lulu.com/transfiguration

Half (50%) of the proceeds from this book (as well as "Living in the Eighth
Day") go to mission efforts.

View or download the latest mission report, Holy Transfiguration Mission
2008, written in the words of members and those who participate and benefit
from the Madison area (Wisconsin) mission -
http://www.angelfire.com/wi/theosis/mission08bklt.pdf (large file ~2M)


Love and Blessings!

Teresa Peneguy Paprock
words&stuff freelancing

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Fulfilling the Gospel as God Made Us

Fulfilling the Gospel as God Made Us

Sermon delivered by Fr John Brian at Holy Transfiguration Mission Chapel in Madison, Wisconsin on Sunday May 18, 2008

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Nueral Buddhists, Atheism and God

May 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist NYT
The Neural Buddhists
By DAVID BROOKS


In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.


To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.


In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species” reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible.
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Rev. Dr. K.M. George - 8th day

The Eighth Day
From “Easter and Ecology” by Rev. Dr. K.M. George

With scientific speculation on time becoming more and more complex in a universe "with no edge of space-time", as Stephen Hawking says in A Brief History of Time, the old image of the cycle re-emerges in the human consciousness in different ways.

Many ancient cultures represented time as turning on itself, as is shown by the cycles of the day, the week and the year.

To the early Christian theologians, the cycles of the week seemed to symbolize the meaninglessness of earthly existence taken into itself. Like the legendary Greek image of the snake swallowing its own tail, the seven day week returns to itself, repeating its cycle.

So the patristic tradition proposed "the eighth day", which broke open the cyclical chain of seven days. The seven day week represented the history of the created world; the eighth day symbolized eternity. Sunday, the day of the resurrection of Christ, was the first and the eighth day at the same time.

Sunday is the day of the sun, the source of life, the first day of the week, and symbolically the first day of creation. It is also the eighth day, the day of the new creation, the day of resurrection, which initiated all creation to eternal life.

The eighth day breaks the monotonous cycle of time and liberates time from bondage to boredom and death. There is no longer evening or morning to mark the bounds of the day, no sun or moon to determine the course of day or night.

The eighth day, outside the weekly cycle, signals the end of the fatalistic resignation to despair built into the ever-repeating cycles of history. It implies rest from the cyclical chain of work.

Industrial civilization has been marked by the assembly line, the infernal cycle of production to which human laborers are chained. The "weekend", which it invented to break the cycle and provide time to rest, is only the beginning of another week's cycle.

The eighth day of resurrection breaks the chain of birth and death. (We may note here the irony that many supermarkets are chain stores - a fitting image of the new slavery which is inescapable in industrialized societies and whose tentacles are spreading quickly to. the rest of the world.)

In the risen Christ, material creation enters the infinity of new life. There is no more recycling or bondage to the laws of time and space. Yet created matter is not annihilated but reconstituted according to a higher law. It is the untold possibilities for our life that are unfolded in this recomposition of matter, as shown by the resurrected Christ.

Matter does not now return to be recycled. It opens itself to the life of God, to the splendor of uncreated light. Time is permeated by Sunday, the day of light, life and joyful rest.

Time, the attribute of the cycle of birth, death and decay, now acquires a new quality and meaning in its open-ended hope in participation in God's own life.

Easter and Ecology
Rev. Dr. K.M. George
Complete article: http://www.goarch.org/en/ourfaith/articles/article8028.asp
Copyright: Printed by Orthdruk Orthodox Printing House, Bialystok, Poland, 1996.
Source: The Orthodoxy and Ecology Resource Book is produced by SYNDESMOS, The World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth.
Editor: Alexander Belopopsky and Dimitri Oikonomou
The author. Rev. Dr K.M. George is a priest and theologian of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India, and was a member of staff of the WCC Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland.

Monday, May 05, 2008

After Resurrection - Divinity and Humanity

After Resurrection - Divinity and Humanity

Sermon delivered by Fr John Brian at Holy Transfiguration Mission Chapel in Madison, Wisconsin on Sunday May 4, 2008

After resurrection....now what? This sermon is further teaching about the gift of Christ Resurrection to us, for us and with us. This is more teachings about the transformative power of Orthodox Christian fasting and healing as preparation of the life to come.

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Friday, May 02, 2008

Through Resurrection - Everything

Through Resurrection - Everything

Sermon delivered by Fr John Brian at Holy Transfiguration Mission Chapel in Madison, Wisconsin on Sunday April 27, 2008

This short sermon is about the gift of Christ Resurrection to us, for us and with us. It is the culmination of the teachings about the transformative power of Orthodox Christian fasting and healing as preparation of the life to come. 4 minutes, 59 seconds

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