Tag: Hymns
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The Good Friday Lamentation and Universal Salvation
by George Demacopoulos | ελληνικά | Română | ру́сский It is striking just how many verses of the central hymn of the most widely attended service in the Orthodox Church assert that Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection provide salvation to everyone—yes, everyone. If hymnography reflects the prayer and thinking of the community, what might this contribute to the millennia-long […]
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Holy Arousal
by Thomas Arentzen St Augustine once observed: “It is longing that makes the heart deep” (Tractates on the Gospel of John 40.10). As a scholar of the early Church, I am often struck by how much early Christians longed. They ached and urged and craved intensely, wanted and thirsted immensely, desired and hungered and yearned […]
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It’s That Time of the Year Again: In Tone Four, “The murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews…”
by Bogdan G. Bucur | ελληνικά | ру́сский | српски Disturbing Words, Disturbed Emotions The words in the title are from one of the stichera at the Beatitudes chanted on Holy Thursday evening (Triodion, 589). Similar references to “arrogant Israel, people guilty of blood,” “bloodthirsty people, jealous and vengeful,” and “the perverse and crooked people of the […]
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Beyond the Binary: Hymnographic Constructions of Orthodox Gender
by Ashley Purpura | ελληνικά | ру́сский Much like gender itself, Orthodox understandings of gender span a spectrum of diverse views. Many who address “the problem of gender” or the “role of women in the church” rely on an assumption that any theological interpretation of gender is necessarily situated along a cisgender binary. Simply, individuals with male […]
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It’s That Time of the Year Again: In Tone Four, “The murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews…”
by Bogdan G. Bucur | ελληνικά | ру́сский Disturbing Words, Disturbed Emotions The words in the title are from one of the stichera at the Beatitudes chanted on Holy Thursday evening (Triodion, 589). Similar references to “arrogant Israel, people guilty of blood,” “bloodthirsty people, jealous and vengeful,” and “the perverse and crooked people of the […]