When I agreed to review this book, I was hoping it would provide the evidence that Orthodox Christianity was essentially just first-century Jewish worship with a Christological core, thereby proving to my Evangelical friends and family that the Orthodox Church was really what they were looking for all along. Coming at it with that mindset, I was disappointed (and that probably serves me right).
Category: Liturgics
An Algorithm for Determining which Troparia and Kontakia to Read During the Hours on a Sunday
As an IT professional, I tend to understand liturgics best when I can envision them as pseudo computer code. For example, the rubrics for determining which troparia and kontakia to read during the Prayers of the Hours on Sundays is complex, but there are only ten defined patterns. The following algorithm gets you the right…
When there are Two Epistle Readings in the Divine Liturgy
When I first started reading the Epistle in church, the first thing I learned was the proper procedure. No one mentioned what to do if there were two readings for the day though. Like so many things in Orthodox Christian liturgics, this is one of those things I found out because I happened to ask…