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Swimming the Bosporus 10: The Good Book and Holy Tradition
I did a lot of church-hopping in my college and Navy days. To simplify the search, I would look to see if a church claimed to be “Bible-believing.” This indicated they were non-denominational, pretty conservative, and focused on the Scriptures. If their name included “Bible Church,” even better.
Following the Bible is the main point of these assemblies, a principle that stems from the Reformation. Martin Luther declared that the Catholic Church was wrong to emphasize both Scripture and tradition. Instead, the authority should be Scripture alone (or, Sola Scriptura in Latin).
You can find all the Swimming the Bosporus posts here.
Luther looked at the Vatican of his day and thought they had lost the plot. He viewed their many rituals, traditions, and innovations as so many barnacles that had attached themselves to the Barque of St. Peter. So, he decided to strip them off.
“Don’t worry, my friend, for Raskova,” she whispered to me. “I clean baby [crap]. It small thing. You sit. Read.” She said, “I am here,” tapping the pages with socket-wrench fingers. “At Dachau too, my job, priest say, sew sheets for vestment, is very small, he tell me, but big in heaven.” (p. 13)
In my 
Jewish communities and their practices. I wrote this letter to her yesterday to support her on her journey.
Apostle to the Plains is the story of the first Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christian priest to be ordained in the United States: Father Nicola Yanney. This is remarkable in itself, but Father Nicola would, in this role, serve as the sole parish priest for almost the entirety of the Great Plains for over a decade, riding a circuit that would take him regularly from Kanas to Michigan, from Michigan to North Dakota, and from North Dakota back to his home in Nebraska. Along this way, he would perform over one thousand baptisms, numerous weddings, and a number of funerals, including for close relatives, and even his own daughter. His is a very American tale, sharing as it does the travails of millions of other immigrants, but his is also very much a family tale, and a tale of great personal sacrifice.
What would Black Gospel Music sound like if it blended with Eastern Orthodox liturgical tradition? Though liturgical traditions have a reputation for their timelessness, or at least for not changing, the Eastern Orthodox liturgy of singing and chanting antiphonally has changed over the past 2,000 years, particularly when Orthodoxy has met with other cultures whose own musical talents and understandings are different.
The name Peter Gilquist is incredibly well known in the Orthodox churches of America today. Father Gilquist, along with several other pastors, led a mass conversion of Evangelical churches into the Antiochian Orthodox Church in 1987, after nearly 15 years of searching for the historical Christian church as described in the book of Acts, and in the epistles of the New Testament. That quest is told in his more famous work, Becoming Orthodox, and in related works by others from that movement (I reviewed one such memoir, Surprised by Christ, late last year), but towards the end of his life, Reverend Gilquist wrote a different sort of work – personal memoirs of many of the key seminal moments in his life, ministries, and faith. Those memoirs were compiled and published several years after his death in the book Memories of His Mercy: Recollections of the Grace and Providence of God. 
