By Walt Garlington The South came into being during the age in Western history when the idea of man’s ability to participate directly in the life of the Holy Trinity, to know God through an actual union with His divine energies, had been rejected (see Fr. John Strickland’s very helpful book The Age of Division […]
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A Sense of the Sacred in the South
By Walt Garlington My father is fond of telling the story of his great-grandfather’s War sword. As a boy, he was in his grandfather John Riley Boyd’s house in Rogers, Arkansas. Resting above the hearth in a place of honor was the sword his grandfather’s father, a soldier in Tennessee, had carried with him in […]
Monasticism: Mystical Marriage with Christ
By: Walt Garlington Monasticism tends to have a bad reputation here in the South. Marriage of man and woman, children, and ancestors have always been the focus and ideal of the Southern people. A peek into the literature of Dixie confirms this. In her novel The Great Meadow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts has the youthful brothers […]
Icons Are a Great Fit for the South
By Walt Garlington The first Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church celebrates the restoration of the icons – specially stylized paintings of Christ, the Mother of God and other saints, and the angels – after more than one hundred years of imperial persecution of those who venerated them. Though the official theology of much […]
Missionary Fieldhands
By Walt Garlington Diuma among the Mercians; Budoc in Ireland and Brittany; Gunthild the servant of the Germans – Missionaries in the Master’s fields, Harvesting the ripe grain, Fertilizing and watering the young shoots, Clearing the soil of the rocks and weeds Of idolatry and false teaching, And sowing the splendid Gospel seed – This […]
Views of Theology: Southern, Greek, and Irish
By Walt Garlington Two important strands in the tapestry of Southern culture are the Greek and the Irish. Most of what Dixie took from each, unfortunately, was of a non-Christian nature. Her Greek teachers were mostly of the ancient, pre-Christian era – Homer, Aristotle, and so forth. From the Irish she has taken a certain […]
John Coltrane’s Jazz & the African Diaspora’s Search for a Religious Home
By Walt Garlington The journey of the African diaspora in the United States to find a religious home has been a winding and circuitous one, from tribal practices to Western Christian denominations to Islamic ethno-nationalism. With essay appearing at the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship, my recommendation that they consider the Orthodox Church as their home will […]
Moving Beyond Southern Ecumenism
By Walt Garlington While there remain some flinty, hardened Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and others here in Dixie, the general religious tendency among Southerners – owing to their innate hospitality and graciousness – is towards a form of Christian ecumenism, in which the Christian believer stands above all the various Christian traditions and partakes of what […]
Orthodoxy in Bayou Land
“Orthodoxy in Bayou Land: The Ancient Faith in Northeast Louisiana”By Walt Garlington It is not unusual to run across ancient things in Northeast Louisiana – Native American arrowheads and burial mounds, old French and Spanish names and settlements, and petrified wood here and there. But, strange as it will sound, the most ancient of them […]
The Shrine of St. Cuthbert
Today, we commemorate St. Bede the Venerable (25 May/7 June). Known as the “Father of English History” and the “Church Historian,” he was a prolific writer, penning the life stories of many Saints, including St. Cuthbert. A “wonderworker of the English land,” St. Cuthbert was commemorated earlier this spring (20 March/2 April) but was also […]
