Christmas Animation: "Cricket On The Hearth" (1967)

Cricket On The Hearth (1967) is a delightful, animated musical version of Charles Dickens' classic tale. A Cricket on the Hearth, tells the story of a poor toymaker and his daughter whom a helpful Cricket named Crocket befriends on Christmas morning. When tragedy strikes the family, it's Crocket who comes to the rescue and restores peace and happiness.

Cretan Artist Attributes Rescue in Car Accident to Miracle of St. Spyridon

Secular weekly newspapers, such as Loipon (22 December), reported on a Cretan artist, who attributes his rescue in a car accident a year ago and his new ability to walk to a miracle of St. Spyridon. Regarding Mr. Emmanuel Kontaros, an artist and family man, Loipon said the following:

"This Christmas will be different for Manuel Kontaros. His name day will find him upright playing with his children, just as before. The nightmare of the terrible car accident, which happened to him as it dawned on the feast of St. Spyridon, is in the past. In 3 to 4 months he will even completely toss away the crutches, say his German doctors, who attribute his walking only to a miracle and the strength of his soul.

When St. Nicholas Appeared to a Soviet Actress in 1941

Popular Soviet film actress Lyubov Sokolova (July 31, 1921 – June 6, 2001), who appeared in over 300 films, having just been married, found herself in Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. On 31 July 1941, her 20th birthday, when nothing as yet heralded a siege of the city, Lyubov set out together with her mother-in-law by train to the city outskirts, where they worked together in a factory. They got off at the designated station and walked down the street. This is what happened afterwards.

Sanity in an American City

“To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you – from the cradle to the grave and beyond – which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up – before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whisky, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”

-- Christopher Isherwood, “Los Angeles” from Exhumations (1966)

Orthodox Fundamentalism, Conspiracies and Harry Potter

The Harry Potter Phenomenon and Orthodox Reactions

Bishop Auxentios of Photiki

The Orthodox Church, contrary to certain well-meaning but misguided efforts by the Faithful and some clergymen to prove other wise, is not opposed to science, progress, or human intellectual development. Even a cursory survey of the writings of the Church Fathers--from St. Basil the Great to St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, to cite two notable examples--and those of our finest theologians lucidly demonstrates that the fear of secular knowledge, of the West, of science, and of secular intellectual trends is unknown to the Orthodox Church. St. Basil the Great instructs us to benefit from what is good even in pagan writers, while St. Nicodemos adapted more than one spiritual source of Western provenance to Orthodox usage. And the late and renowned Photios Kontoglou, a conservative and decidedly traditional Orthodox thinker, benefited from the writings of classical Greek philosophy and without reluctance fathomed the depths of such Western thinkers as Blaise Pascal. Anti-Western, anti-intellectual thinking is not part of the Patristic consensus, except as the Fathers approach the dogmatic deviations of Western Christianity. We must keep these notions in mind, as we confront technologies, ideologies, social thought, and intellectual trends formed in a changing world and in a secular context that some times challenges the immutable truths which shape our thinking and lives as Orthodox Christians.