St Andrew of Crete on the Annunciation

Today that nature, which was first brought forth from the earth, receives divinity for the first time; the dust, having been raised up, hastens with festive trend toward the highest peak of glory. Today, from us and for us, Adam offers Mary to God as firstfruits, and, with the unpoisoned parts of the muddy dough, is formed a bread for the rebuilding of the human race....Today pure human nature receives from God the gift of the original creation and reverts to its original purity. By giving our inherited splendor, which had been hidden by the deformity of vice, to the Mother of Him who is beautiful, human nature receives a magnificent and most divine renovation, which becomes a complete restoration. The restoration, in turn, becomes deification, and this becomes a new formation, like its pristine state.

St Andrew of Crete

From the Menaion - 2 February

Synaxarion

On 2 February, we celebrate the Hypapanty, or Encounter of our Lord Jesus Christ, when He was received in the arms of Just Simeon.

The arms of Simeon, carrying Christ Jesus, resemble the bosom of the Father, where He is enthroned above. Simeon receives Him within the Temple on the second.

All glory and power to our God throughout all the ages. Amen.

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Mayan Apocalypse Day

If you believe in the Mayan apocalypse stuff, and you get this, this is for you.




As a follow up, if through some failure of calamity the world still exists Saturday, go here.

Professor Glenn on the Tyranny of Public Education

Professor Charles L Glenn of Boston University once contributed a thought-provoking piece over at First Things concerning Secular Education in the United States. It is well worth reading and pondering. Below are a few excerpts.

Most Americans are products of the public school’s 140-year near-monopoly on education, and have an understandable residual loyalty to our current educational settlement; many believe, as advocates of the “myth of the common school” have been arguing since Horace Mann, that only the public school can form citizens. But low test scores and concern over the moral vacuousness of both curriculum and school life dominated by peer culture have shaken faith in the public system. Parents are seeking alternatives, not only in private schools but in charter schools (legally “public” but functionally private), homeschooling, and cyberschools. Even those parents who do not want religion taught in the schools their children attend usually see no problem with other children attending schools whose religious character is preferred by their parents.

America did not always have a rigid educational establishment that claimed religious neutrality. Its rise was propelled by anti-Catholic sentiment, leading to a unified educational system that displaced the patchwork of local arrangements that prevailed in the early republic and that provided a degree of religious pluralism surprising to those raised with the contemporary idea of the separation of church and state. It was common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for public funding to be provided to schools that we would now consider “private” and religious, the great majority of them Protestant but some of them Catholic. These denominational arrangements were actually the norm in federally funded schooling for children on Indian reservations until the late nineteenth century.

Our nation needs to confront the loss of faith in public education, a loss fueled both by disappointing international comparisons of test results and by a severing of the rootedness of schools in local communities. Consolidation of school districts, professionalization of educational administration, the unresponsiveness of teachers’ unions to the concerns of parents, and ballooning state and federal requirements, all have led to a loss of confidence in America’s schools.

Read the whole article here.

Remember

If you choose Dr Pepper,

it is not a vote for Coke over Pepsi.

Cast your vote according to your conscience.

From The Spiritual Life and How to be Attuned to It

St Theophan the Recluse

In the soul and body are needs, including such ordinary ones as family and social needs. These needs in and of themselves do not constitute any distinct desire, but merely form the pretext for seeking gratification for themselves. When a need is satisfied in a particular way on a given occasion, then ever afterwards, whenever this need is aroused, along with it is born the desire for that which has satisfied it previously.

There is no gap between the time we make our prayer and when it is heard; the only necessity is that it comes from our heart. It is our telegraphic line to Heaven. The very same prayers, which are not from our heart, but which come only from our head and tongue, do not produce as ray which rises to heaven, and they are not audible there. Those are not even prayers, but only prayer-like modes.