A Selection of Saints of the British Isles and Western Europe and Africa From left to right: St. Genevieve of Paris, St. Kentigern of Glasgow, St. Sebastian of Rome, and St. Anthony the Great of Egypt. By Walt Garlington ♱ St. Genevieve of Paris, 3/16 January As a child St. Geneviève met St. Germanus of […]
Search Results for: saints for dixie
Orthodox Saints for Dixie: December
A Selection of Saints of the British Isles and Western Europe and Africa Clockwise from top left: Saints Birinus, Ambrose, Finnian, Lucy, and Flannan. By Walt Garlington ♱ St. Birinus, Apostle of Wessex, 3/16 December Birinus, a native of Lombardy, consecrated Bishop by Asterius Bishop of Genoa, and then sent by Pope Honorius to convert […]
Dixie Missions, Japanese Style
Saint Nikolai Kasatkin (1857-1912) labored as a missionary to Japan for nearly fifty years. When he began his work, the Japanese saw all foreigners as beasts, and Christianity as a villainous sect to which only reprobates and sorcerers could belong. When he reposed, he left behind over 250 Japanese Orthodox communities (oca.org/saints). We Orthodox Christians […]
On Being a Good Neighbor: St. Brigid of Kildare
By Walt Garlington “Hospitality is one of the best known Southern virtues, part of the inheritance that has come down to us from our English and Celtic forebears. Our Holy Mother Brigid is one of those largely forgotten figures who helped enrich our patrimony with this virtue, who helped to cultivate it in the souls […]
Queen Lucy & Queen Mary
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“Southerners Can’t Be Orthodox”
By Rebecca Dillingham Never, never, never let anyone tell you that, in order to be Orthodox, you must be Eastern. The West was fully Orthodox for a thousand years, and her venerable liturgy is far older than any of her heresies. — St. John Maximovitch There’s a contingent of haters – dare I say, a […]
