Thursday, September 29, 2016

Book: "Warhol/Icon: The Creation of Image"


Warhol/Icon was a major exhibition co-created by Haunch of Venison and Potnia Thiron Gallery in Athens, which explored Andy Warhol's obsession with fame through his work as a painter of ‘icons’. The emphasis in the exhibition was on the relationship between Warhol’s own Byzantine religious beliefs, Slavic background and devotion to his mystical mother, and his apparently unfettered celebration of an American celebrity culture.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Interview with an Actor Who Possesses the Cap of Saint Paisios the Athonite


September 16, 2016

Petros Xekoukis gave an interview for the magazine Loipon with Renee Sarantinou, and revealed among other things how he acquired the cap of Saint Paisios.

You have in your home the cap worn by Saint Paisios?

Of course, I have the cap of Saint Paisios. I saw him for the first time in 1979, where I met him at Panagouda, at his cell, at the Skete of Saint Panteleimon, at the Holy Mountain.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Saint Porphyrios the Actor and the Mockery of God

St. Porphyrios the Mime (Feast Day - September 15)

Verses

Persuaded to mock Baptism, you mock error,
Being cleansed Porphyrios, and beheaded by the sword.

Saint Porphyrios was an actor in the days of Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363). In the course of his birthday celebration, the Emperor persuaded Porphyrios to mimic and make fun of the Christian Mysteries, specifically Holy Baptism.

Hence, Porphyrios entered into a font with water, and cried out: "The servant of God Porphyrios is baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." And having immersed himself into the water, he got out and put on the white robe of the newly-illumined, crying out: "Now I am a Christian."

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Fr. George Florovsky and a 1976 Super Bowl Commercial


Tall and gaunt, he would appear in the long black cassock of an Orthodox priest on the Princeton campus. The erudite undergraduates, considerably more flexible in their dress, styled him “the Grand Inquisitor” — a fitting title, given his tendency to project a sense of doctrinal authority. At Princeton, the staff of the Firestone Library christened Florovsky a “patron saint of photocopying” for the countless hours he spent at the copy machine. Apparently his photocopying talent was so well known that he even became an inspiration for the 1976 Super Bowl commercial of the Xerox Corporation, featuring a monk busily copying medieval manuscripts.* In this way, unawares, Florovsky contributed to raising the American advertising industry to a higher level of intellectual sophistication.