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Prayers for a Time of Devastating Pestilence

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“Are any among you suffering? Let them pray. Are any cheerful? Let them sing praises! Are any among you sick? Let them call for the presbyters of the Church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the Name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will heal those who are sick and the Lord will raise them up. If they have committed sins, they will be forgiven. Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective!” (James 5: 13-16)

“Peace I leave with you! My peace I give to you! I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled and do not let it be afraid.” (John 14:27)

These prayers are from a variety of Orthodox sources, with the last being a reader’s service especially intended for home use by families. They can teach us how to respond to the current time of trial not by fretting over the latest news, but by opening our hearts and minds to divine grace, and to the peace our Lord has offered us, through fervent prayer.

First Discourse on the Annunciation by St. Gregory the Wonderworker (Part I)

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Truth first enters the world through a word and the more sublime a truth, the more sublime is the language that expresses it. In the essay below written in the third century, St. Gregory the Wonder Worker writes of the Annunciation of the Theotokos, where the angel Gabriel converses with the Virgin Mary in preparation of the coming of the Son of God as man.

The Incarnation of Christ, an event of the highest cosmological significance, is also a deep mystery that incorporates all human history into an ordained end, aligns the nature of man with the purposes of God, and promises the restoration of the entire creation. The words that describe it have to reach deep and high. They have to rise to a poetic majesty that remain comprehensible to the human soul in order to lift it to places where the mystery can be understood, even in part. Read it slowly and carefully.

Recent Articles

St. Patrick of Ireland: A Saint for Dark Times

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In this talk, given to monks and pilgrims at the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1977, Fr Seraphim Rose shows how St Patrick must be regarded not just as a romantic figure from a bygone era, but also as our own contemporary, enlightening not just the ancient Celts but ourselves as well, who are surrounded by a very different kind of darkness from that of pre-Christian Ireland.

How Not To Be An Accidental Iconoclast

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The Triumph of Orthodoxy, which we celebrate on the first Sunday of Lent, entails both an affirmation and a negation. It commemorates the restoration, in the year 787, of icons to Orthodox temples and homes, and at the same time it commends what the Seventh Ecumenical Council called their “veneration and honor (timitiki proskynisis)” while reserving their “real worship (latreia)” for God alone.

The Threshold to Lent: Remembering our Explusion from Paradise

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First we must remember what we have lost. Indeed, “all mankind weeps and sighs over the first Adam, over the now elusive phantom of happiness.” But we don’t realize that it is paradise itself from which we have been expelled and that this is why we live as exiles. “The whole world, harassed and weary, weeps because of its waywardness, because of its naked soul; because life is aimless and joyless. Nothing can fill our life so that we might unconditionally feel the fullness of true—not phantom—happiness; for this fullness is only in God.”

The Prophetic Role of Mount Athos in the Contemporary World

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Mount Athos, the center of Orthodox Monasticism located on an autonomous peninsula in Northern Greece, has what Dr. Jean Claude Larchet calls a “prophetic role” in the modern world. This is true not only for Orthodox Christians, but believers in other religions and even atheists, Larchet writes.

How The Great Truth Dawned

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A lingering vestige of the Cold War between the United States and Russia includes what could be called a ‘reflexive bi-polarism,’ a simplistic and crude reduction that caricatures not only Russia’s political role in the world today, but its history, culture, and people. It’s an unfortunate and impoverishing state of affairs.

Why Beauty Matters

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The world lost one of its finest, most original, and most independent thinkers with the repose of Sir Roger Scruton last weekend. Sir Roger was also a friend of Another City; we featured several of his articles, and we were proud to have him as an early subscriber to this journal.

The Death of the Lion and the Dream of the Jersey Shore: Maturity Seasoned In Time

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In this enchanting tale, Fr Stephen takes us back to his Fishtown neighborhood in Philadelphia, where Kusheri’s and Fr Naum’s fantasy of soaring in the summer sky over the Jersey Shore is interrupted by a young couple in love and the recollection of childhood questions about the relation of God, man, and animals — about the relation of the childlike and the mature — and about questions of death and resurrection.

Mother and Child

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Sometimes what seem like simple, everyday reflections can run deep. That is, they can be radical in the original sense or returning us to the radix or root of the matter, taking us not to exotic locales but bringing us back to a home we had almost forgotten. It seems to us that this short contemplative reflection by Another City Contributing Editor Frederica Mathewes-Green possesses precisely this quality.

We Have Come from Afar: A Christmas Oration

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We have come from afar to venerate the infant Christ — not from the land of the wise men but out of the darkness of our own souls, out of the murk of sinfulness. We have been guided by the miraculous star that has risen within us, obeying its mysterious and powerful call.

Body Mutilation, Biopunk, and Transgressive Individualism: Is Society Now Adopting the Values of ‘Blade Runner’?

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Ominous tattoos, bizarre body piercing, and transsexual mutilations are only the beginning, argues Orthodox bioethicist Wesley J. Smith. “Transhumanists” are true believers who envision a point in time—known in movement parlance as “the Singularity” — when the crescendo of technological advances becomes unstoppable, culminating in attaining the age-old dream of material immortality via uploading minds into AI computers, merged with robotic technologies, to create blended beings with the intellectual and physical powers of the cyborgs depicted in “Blade Runner.”

How Not to Perish Eternally

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A merciful heart is the likeness of God. And if we reject such a heart, then we of necessity reject God Himself. And how then can we be saved, how then can we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven?

How to Pray in the Event of Civil War: The Unusual Story of the Prayer of Patriarch Hermogenes

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“How have we arrived,” asks Stanford University historian Victor David Hanson, “at the brink of a veritable civil war?” And a recent “Washington Post” headline reads: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil War.” Surely the political and cultural polarization of America has now reached levels comparable to that most terrible national conflict of the nineteenth century.

In Depth Articles

Original Sin According to St. Paul

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In regard to the doctrine of original sin as contained in the Old Testament and illuminated by the unique revelation of Christ in the New Testament, there continues to reign in the denominations of the West a great confusion, which in the last few centuries seems to have gained much ground in the theological problematics of the Orthodox East.

The Divine Liturgy as Mystical Experience

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There are cases in scripture where God appears directly and sensibly to man—indeed, does not only appear to him, but walks, speaks, dines, and even wrestles. There is no suggestion that, because God is “purely spiritual,” such appearances are not of God “as He is in Himself.”

Nature and City in the Greek East

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The poet seems to suggest that we can now find the natural city only in the imagination. The bridge for the modernist poet is now an interior, and even a psychological function. It was not always so.

Lost in Manhattan

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