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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  THE PHILIP LUDWELL III ORTHODOX FELLOWSHIP “Nurturing the roots of Orthodoxy in Dixie’s Land” Holy Week 2024         Beloved Brothers and Sisters: Greetings in the Lord! On behalf of everyone involved with the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship, I want to extend our warmest regards and prayers as we continue our struggle toward […]

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 […]

By Benjamin Dixon Understanding the ways and means by which the Orthodox and Southern traditions harmonize is crucial to the evangelization of the South. For myself, and many Southerners, the journey to Holy Orthodoxy feels less a conversion than the recovery of a lost inheritance. This goes well beyond the connections made to Southern agrarianism, […]

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 […]