Welcome to our relaunched Q&A Blog, featuring Questions and Answers about the Orthodox Christian Church, its teachings, beliefs and practices, how it views and interacts with modern (or rather, post-modern) culture, other Christian confessions, non-Christian religions, cults, etc.
To submit a question to Fr. Steven Kostoff, please visit our web form on our parish website.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Notes from Q&A Session I

Dear Parish Faithful,

We had an excellent response on Wednesday evening to our scheduled Question & Answer Session I here in the church, following Vespers. Even more importantly, the questions and developed discussions to follow were lively and fruitful. We will definitely keep our next scheduled Q & A Session II on Wednesday evening, August 12. Some of the varied questions the other evening were:

  • How do we as Orthodox approach "heroic efforts" toward sustaining life, primarily as related to end-of-life issues.
This led to further discussions of "living wills;" a fuller and more holistic approach to death & dying; the "paschal nature" of the dying process, etc. This further expanded into a discussion about "eschatology" and the presence of the Kingdom of God in the world today, and how the Kingdom is actualized in the Liturgy. In relation to all this, everyone expressed their amazement over the series of photos of the deceased Orthodox monk from Mt. Athos I sent out earlier in the week, entitled "Smile from Eternity."

  • The place and meaning of holy relics in the life of the Church and how this phenomenon is understood.
Relics are related to the Incarnation and the sanctification of the whole person, soul and body.

  • The Orthodox understanding of the Book of Revelation (The Apocalypse) and the so-called "rapture" taught by various Protestant groups, and which is vigorously rejected in Orthodox theology as an unscriptural innovation of the 19th c.
  • The Second Coming of Christ and what this means for Christian believers, etc.
The glorified Christ will come once at the end of the age to gather His flock from the "four corners" of the world, and He will be recognized by all.

I also passed out a list of Contemporary Orthodox Classics that you may want to "file away" somewhere, and have therefore linked to it from this blog entry.

Do you ever have a question about the Orthodox Faith that you always wanted to ask? Is there an area of interest that you want to explore a bit more deeply? Then our Question & Answer Session II will be a good forum for precisely that, on Wednesday evening, August 12.

Fr. Steven
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