One of the most disturbing ideas I’ve heard in the recent push to “modernize” the Coptic Orthodox Church and make it more “attractive” to people in today’s society is the idea of priests putting aside their priestly cassocks in favor of pants, shirts, and collars, like other western clergy. The general arguments in favor of abandoning the priestly cassock essentially argue that it is too traditional to the point of alienating people in modern society. – …

In or around the first year of the Lord, a meeting took place that would forever change the course of history. There was in those days an older woman living in the hill country of Judea. At this particular time, she was hiding, because something wondrous had happened to her. Despite the old age of this woman and her husband, a Jewish priest, and despite the fact that she, as a woman, was unable to – …

You must all exercise great diligence and fervent desire in this matter, that someone may be designated by the Holy Spirit to preside over you who will keep his eye fixed wholly on the things of God and will not allow his gaze to be distracted hither and thither by any of the things prized in this life. It was because of this danger, I think, that the levitical law gave to the Levite no – …