This week on Come Receive the Light, Ninos Oshaana speaks about his popular online Orthodox community The Orthodox Circle, and the role the Internet plays in supporting our faithful and reaching out to the nation. The site maintains a community blog where members post their own thoughts and reflections, from the commonplace to the deeply inspirational. Bloggers range from Fr. Kevin Scherer of Orthodox Christian Fellowship to podcaster Molly Sabourin. On June 6 Molly posted the following thoughts on her Orthodox Circle blog :

Today, most of us in the Church are familiar with the old adage that ten percent of the people do ninety percent of the work. The real statistics may be even grimmer. The Church is full of burned-out priests and stressed-out parishioners who regularly make real sacrifices for the good of the local parish, only to find that their personal offerings are met with indifference and criticism.

The Spring 2007 issue of The Handmaiden: A Journal for Women Serving God Within the Orthodox Christian Faith addresses the theme of "Loneliness, Isolation, & Community". The cover story is authored by Fr. Christopher Metropulos, and is reproduced here in full. For more information on The Handmaiden, visit the magazine online at Conciliar Press .

If America is in moral decline, if respect for human dignity runs cold, if all discourse is coarsening, if hospitality is withering under rampant individualism, if sexual confusion is the new norm, if secularism increasingly defines our laws and institutions-can such cultural deterioration be seen as a gift? Perhaps it can, and the key to such optimism may be to understand that as America slips further into depravity, it also slips closer to the very conditions in which the early Church thrived.

Cultural deterioration is never inherently a good development, and Christian citizens should not encourage or ignore it in the naïve hope that a renewal of early church conditions will automatically produce a corresponding renewal of early church piety. We do not sin, St. Paul asserts, so that grace may abound. But should dark times darken hope, the culture-influencing faith of our early brothers and sisters may provide encouragement.

Earlier this year, Fr. Chris Metropulos spoke to an audience at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology about the critical need for a vital and active Orthodox Christian media witness in America. The full text of that stirring speech is now available.

Greetings, my brothers and sisters. I am here today to speak to you about the ministry of our Church that I am honored - truly honored - to lead: the Orthodox Christian Network, the national media ministry of our bishops in America.

Courage

But first, I want to speak with you about the spirit that is behind this work, and the spirit which I believe needs to be behind all of our work as the Body of Christ in this world. As I reflect on not only what it is that OCN does, but on how and why, I find myself reaching for old words that we don't hear used much anymore. Words like honor. Words like courage.

In September 2004, Conciliar Press and AGAIN Magazine (www.conciliarpress.com ) published an interview with Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster, Ph.D. The subsequent article is re-produced here in full. Fr. Webster is our guest this week on the May 19, 2007 broadcast of Come Receive the Light. He is the co-author, with Dr. Darrell Cole, of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West, published in 2004 by Regina Orthodox Press.

In my military branch, the Army, the chaplaincy is dominated by Baptists, Pentecostals, and assorted evangelicals. There are some outside this category – a handful of Roman Catholics, a few Jews, a sprinkling of liberal Protestants, and fewest of all – Orthodox.

There are over 300 scripture references in the Divine Liturgy each week. From the book of Psalms to the Epistles to the Gospels, Orthodox worship is literally bathed in Holy Scripture.

St. Timothy was the spiritual son of St. Paul, the Apostle. By God's grace, the Church has preserved for us some of the timeless and challenging wisdom St. Paul gave his spiritual son.

In St. Paul's second letter to Timothy, while Timothy was the young priest of his first parish, Paul challenged him: "Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman who needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." 2 Timothy 2:15. The clarity of Paul's injunction to Timothy applies to us today.

There's an old American spiritual classic that says, "This world is not my home, I'm just a passin' through." There seems to be a notion in today's popular American religion that this world is either more important than it should be, or not nearly important enough. The lack of a clear vision of how the eternal and the temporary are to be related and valued is a symptom of our modern loss of an Orthodox Christian mindset.

Brothers and sisters, I want to speak to you about martyrdom. In this fallen, broken world, we can never know what the future holds for us. We can never know what trials we will face as we follow the path God has placed before us.

Blessed Feast! Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! I feel great joy seeing all of you gathered here today for this great Feast of our Lord, Palm Sunday. Or, as it is also known, the Feast of the Entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem.

“Watchfulness,” writes St. Hesychius in the Philokalia, “is a spiritual method which, if diligently practiced over a long period, completely frees us with God’s help from impassioned thoughts, impassioned words, and evil actions. It leads, in so far as this is possible, to a sure knowledge of the inapprehensible God, and helps us to penetrate the divine and hidden mysteries. It enables us to fulfill every divine commandment in the Old and New Testaments and bestows upon us every blessing of the age to come.” Watchfulness may be called a virtue, but it is also, in the words of St. Hesychius, “a way of embracing every virtue.”