Arcanus Maximus

I have been interested in learning more about our Orthodox brothers and sisters. This started after hearing an interesting story on Sunday on BBC Radio about Prince Charles and the Greek orthodox church (5/16)

Here are some additional resources of note I found:
The Old Jordanville Prayerbook
The Orthodox Church in America
The Greek Othodox Church
Orthodox Christian Information Center
How to Pray in Church

Posted by jtk at 09:07 PM | Permalink

From the NY Times:

I recently searched the Web for a banana photo. Google Images, as is its wont, provided me with more than 100,000 examples (the first page of results included a person in a banana costume and a banana-shaped futon).

But I wanted a high-resolution photo of a banana - the actual fruit - for my own purposes. A public-domain banana, in other words.

I found one at morguefile.com, a site that offers free stock photos with no strings attached. (It is politely suggested that photographers be credited, but it is not mandatory.) Don't let the site's name put you off: a "morgue" is a term commonly used by media companies for a repository of photos and materials stored for future reference or reuse.

MorgueFile has more than 15,000 images that can be downloaded by pretty much anyone for just about any purpose. A helpful search log reveals that recent photo subjects sought by visitors include cement, France and a lemon. Popular searches include people, food and flowers.

Other sites offering free stock photos (with few or no restrictions) include www.imageafter.com and www.bigfoto.com. But Michael Connors, the founder of MorgueFile and a Flash programmer for Grey Interactive in Manhattan, insists on very high-resolution images. He added that MorgueFile was "not just for free photos, but to see what something looks like from different angles - I like to think of it as an image reference archive."

Posted by jtk at 08:37 PM | Permalink

Just found my first Black Widow spider at the new house. It was outside near the kids playhouse. Coincidentally, this happened as I was spraying for bugs around the perimeter of the house.

Posted by jtk at 08:23 PM | Permalink

I was mowing the yard today. If you could see my back yard you would know how dismal this is. It is a steep hill that is sparsely covered with grass and weeds. My front yard has a great covering of Bermuda grass, but the back is so steep I have written it off until we have the money for a retaining wall, and can regrade it. While mowing I listen to mp3 files I have recorded off the BBC. Today I listened to Sunday and Sunday Worship from Sunday 16 May 2004 at Pluscarden Abbey Sunday Worship was particularly good. There is something so peaceful about the Latin Mass sung in Gregorian Chant. The homily was as particularly interesting. There is something quite peaceful about the exertion of mowing. I am not sure why. Listening to Worship while mowing may seem odd but they actually go very well together. HOMILY: ABBOT HUGH GILBERT 40 days of lent, 50 days of Easter. The liturgy has us still in the latter and will keep us there till the feast of Pentecost in 2 weeks’ time. 40 days of Lent, 50 days of Easter. 40 to be with Christ in the desert, 40 to connect with his Passion, 40 to follow God incarnate down into the depths. 50 for a taste of paradise, 50 to see him rise and ascend, 50 for the gift of the Holy Spirit. 40 to recognise sin, 50 to revel in grace. 40 for repentance, 50 for forgiveness. 40 days of Lent: they’re the symbol of our four-cornered world and life’s hard angles; of Israel’s 40-year wearisome trek to the Promised Land, of the lessons it takes a lifetime to learn. 50 days of Easter: they’re gratuitous, they’re joy. 7 times 7 days, with a 50th to round the circle; an annual jubilee; arrival more than movement; a touch of eternity in time; a symbol of another life, the life of the world to come. What, in a line, is Christianity? God becoming man and man becoming God. the Son of God becoming the son of man – and the sons and daughters of men becoming the children of God. Lent, Holy Week, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, the Passion of the Christ: it's the Son of God entering our temporal life all the way to our death. Easter, Ascension, Pentecost: it's the answering phrase; it’s us entering, by faith and sacrament, the life of the risen Christ, the life of sonship in the Spirit, all the way to the vision of God. 40 days of Lent, 50 days of Easter. Not a liturgical game, but the mystery of the Pasch in the midst of our years, a passage from death to life, symbolic and real. “His anger,” says a Psalm, “lasts but for a moment, his favour through life. At night there are tears, but joy comes with the dawn.” The evening and tears of Lent and Good Friday, the dawn and the joy of Easter Sunday, Eastertide. Blessed are we when our life in time is turned by an empty tomb to a life in God.

Posted by jtk at 07:51 PM | Permalink

Sorry about the wierd traffic. I had to reload my Linux system and restore everything. You may have seen a lot of old posts again. Maybe time to revisit them ;-)

Posted by jtk at 07:34 PM | Permalink

A story from the NY Times about the rebuilding of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at ground zero. I find it amazing whenever I hear stories about rebirth and renewal. One of the details that grabbed me is that the Church contained relics of St. Nicholas, St. Catherine and St. Sava. The bones of the saints of old have mingled with the ashes of the newly martyred

Richard Perry/The New York Times
Among the items that were salvaged from St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church were, from top, a book and a bell from the altar, and a gong from the bell that was atop the church. The most precious of the old church's possessions were never recovered.

Solace on the Site of Disaster
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: May 14, 2004

t is the smallest building planned at ground zero. But the architects who will compete to design the new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church may face the biggest challenge.

They will be asked by Archbishop Demetrios, the primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, for a design at once unmistakably ecclesiastical yet in harmony with the bold secular architecture around it, one that captures unearthly mystery in tangible dimensions and conveys a sense of something outside human experience.

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"Within this area, which experienced the horror of total catastrophe, which was the ultimate in human ugliness, you have this type of place which is not a house, not a business, not a museum, not a symphony hall," the archbishop said.

"It's a religious place, which opens the realm of holiness: this total other, the transcendent."

And all of this on a parcel of 5,200 square feet, set in a park across Liberty Street from the main World Trade Center site, roughly the spot where the little St. Nicholas Church stood until the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

The new St. Nicholas will not be a simple parish church, Archbishop Demetrios said, but a combination church and multiuse, interdenominational center "that offers itself to people of all faiths or even without faith." It would include an exhibition of the few remnants of the old church, which was crushed by the fall of the south tower.

These include icons of St. Dionysios of Zakynthos and the Zoodochos Pege, or life-giving fountain; a small bell that once hung next to the altar; a hand-embroidered velvet Bible covering; and wax candles fused into a serpentine tangle.

St. Nicholas Church was founded in 1916 and soon moved into a modest three-story structure at 155 Cedar Street, on a 22-by-55-foot lot, that had been built as a private dwelling in the 1830's and later turned into a tavern. The church added a fourth floor and a bell cote but still fell 106 stories shy of its giant neighbors to the north.

The congregation, about 70 people from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Westchester County and New Jersey, now worships at SS. Constantine and Helen Cathedral in Brooklyn. "It is the same faces, different building," said Peter Drakoulias, a board member of the church. "Same people. Same hearts. Same hopes."

Mr. Drakoulias said church members supported the idea of rebuilding St. Nicholas as a place of solace and remembrance in which anyone would feel comfortable. "It's an essential part of the mission, as far as the congregation is concerned," he said.

More than $2 million in contributions have been made to the rebuilding effort. In January, the mayor of Bari, Italy, site of the 11th-century San Nicola Basilica, donated 258,000 euros (about $307,000).

The lot on which St. Nicholas stood will most likely be condemned by the state; that is, taken under eminent domain. In return, the church will receive a larger parcel - 65 by 80 feet - on the same block but closer to Liberty Street.

The details are not yet set, said Kevin M. Rampe, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

"The historic nature of the church and the fact that it's been there so long has convinced everyone that trying to provide space for it would be important to the future, in terms of telling the story of what happened Sept. 11," Mr. Rampe said.

Daniel Libeskind, the master planner of the trade center project, said the church was "part of the spiritual legacy of the site."

"St. Nicholas, as small as it was, was an incredibly moving piece of Lower Manhattan," he said. "It glowed with diversity and the beauty of meditation."

Archbishop Demetrios envisions an international design contest, once the specifics of the site are fixed. Widely published renderings of the trade center memorial showed St. Nicholas with a gable roof and belfry, but this was a kind of visual space holder.

The question is whether the new St. Nicholas needs traditional features to assert its ecclesiastical identity. "You don't expect a pure Byzantine-style church," the archbishop said. "On the other hand, if you depart too radically as a totally modern structure, then that is not perhaps the best way."

Negotiating this line will be difficult, allowed Nicholas P. Koutsomitis, an architect on the board of the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Manhattan who is developing the master plan for the new St. Nicholas.

"Traditionally, a Byzantine dome has been strongly identified with the Greek Orthodox church," Mr. Koutsomitis said. "The trick, in my opinion, will be to produce something that somehow has a visible element of that, yet is more of a modern architectural piece of sculpture."

One of the younger Greek Orthodox churches in Manhattan, St. Spyridon in Washington Heights, was built in the early 50's, when the glass-and-steel International style was on the rise.

Yet its interior is extravagantly, exuberantly traditional; every square inch is ornamented with Byzantine artwork under a high dome depicting Christ.

"The traditionalist in me says that the interior should follow a Byzantine motif," said Steve Hantzarides, president of the board of St. Spyridon.

But Constantine L. Tsomides, a Massachusetts architect who has followed the redevelopment of St. Nicholas, cautioned the archdiocese in 2002 that too literal a Byzantine plan "will result in a building resembling an artificial theme park."

The mixture of the historic and the contemporary at ground zero runs deeper than most New Yorkers know. The most precious of the old church's possessions - relics, or tiny bone fragments, of St. Nicholas, St. Catherine and St. Sava - were never recovered.

To Archbishop Demetrios, the notion that the saints' relics were intermingled in the dust with the remains of the attack victims only serves to sanctify the site further. "Imagine," he said, "a cemetery that somehow has been a burial place for many centuries."

Posted by jtk at 11:16 PM | Permalink

The NY Times discusses street names that have outlived their usefulness. I love reading about how areas in cities evolve. It is interesting to see the same spot in a town photographed over time. I also love when you find anachronisms like old signs or lampposts.

It is also time again to plug one of my favorite sites: Forgotten NY

May 10, 2004 When the Street Name Outlives the Street By DIANE CARDWELL On Columbia Street along the Brooklyn waterfront stands a single sign announcing Irving Street. It is a standard, green-and-white banner of the sort marking thousands of intersections in the city, and, like the one a few yards down for Sedgwick Street, there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Except that, conventionally speaking, these streets no longer exist. Crossed off the city's official maps in 1991, the two streets in Carroll Gardens, the scene of frequent factory fires and the home to thriving legal and illegal businesses, are technically no longer there. And, given their physical states, they could hardly be called thoroughfares. Irving is a mere gash in the sidewalk, showing patches of cobblestones and butting up against a chain-link fence that guards a vast expanse of weeds and broken glass. Sedgwick is a dead-end spit roughly six car lengths long, functioning as an egress to a parking lot. The signs are still there, according to a spokesman for the city's Department of Transportation, only because Columbia, which runs perpendicular to Irving and Sedgwick, is still a mapped street. Like disused train stations glinting in the murky light of subway tunnels, or the faded lettering of past businesses on aged brick, these streets have become ghosts, spectral flashes of the lives once lived there. Although the city's grid, hewn as it is from concrete and steel, asphalt and schist, can seem permanent, it is actually fluid, a flux driven by ever-changing traffic patterns, populations and development imperatives. The streets, like people, fatten and thin over time, change course or direction and one day simply vanish. But sometimes, they leave a trace. All over town there are remnants of a long-gone city, as well as those of a metropolis imagined but not yet built. There are the streets in Lower Manhattan that run for a block or two and then end in a massive, glittering office tower. There is the overpass in Staten Island that leads to nowhere, the remains of a Robert Moses-era project that was started but never completed. Or the lone street sign proclaiming a part of Myrtle Avenue that once ran east from Jay Street in Brooklyn but has now been subsumed by the Metrotech office complex. And then there is Red Hook Lane, a one-block vestige of the borough's colonial past that could edge even closer to extinction today, when the City Planning Commission votes on a Downtown Brooklyn rezoning plan that would officially erase it from the city's map. In the 1760's, Red Hook Lane was the major road running from what was then the center of Brooklyn through Dutch farms to Red Hook. Local historians say that the lane was a key route for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and was where riflemen would position themselves to attack the British. It also was where, in August 1776, George Washington observed the fighting at Gowanus during the Battle of Long Island, which is sometimes known as the Battle of Brooklyn. Now, though, it is little more than a grimy, garbage-strewn alley standing in the way of future construction. "It is the last remnant of something that was very important in Brooklyn as it was emerging from an agricultural economy," said Otis Pratt Pearsall, a lawyer who lives in Brooklyn and who has studied the area's history. "There weren't very many roads.'' Referring to Red Hook Lane's current location between Fulton Street and Livingston Street, Mr. Pearsall said, "At that juncture right there is where there was a church and around that church was a cluster of dwellings and that was Brooklyn." As a member of the Brooklyn Heights Association, a neighborhood group, Mr. Pearsall is trying to make sure that Red Hook Lane is commemorated in some way if it is built over. "It's not just a street," he said. "It was the crossroads of the world as far as Brooklyn was concerned." Sometimes, city officials said, there are discrepancies between what the official city map shows and what is on the ground. Throughout the city, there are streets that have been added to the map but not yet constructed, or others that have been built in anticipation of unfinished projects. "Once something's been approved, we de-map the street," said Kellie O'Brien, office manager of the Topography Bureau in the Brooklyn borough president's office. "What's physically out there, there's always a possibility that it's different." Budget constraints often contribute to variances between what is on paper and what actually exists. "Things sit idle sometimes," said Richard Bearak, deputy director of planning and development in the borough president's office. Take Irving and Sedgwick Streets, which were removed from the city's official map amid plans to widen Columbia Street for use as a truck route, Brooklyn officials said. The streets, which were only officially recognized by the city in the 1890's although they had already been in use, ran west from Columbia past Van Brunt Street to the waterfront, playing host to a shifting array of businesses, including a cotton-packing plant, an ice wharf, a glycerol factory, a lumber yard and a large fruit packing firm called Hills Brothers and Company. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the streets were the scenes of seemingly constant factory fires. In 1896, a fire at the Oil Seed Pressing Company belched smoke throughout the neighborhood, clouding a dance at nearby Irving Hall. The festivities continued, even though the dancers could barely see one another through the thick smoke, until the police shut the party down. There also was high drama at the waterfront end of Irving and Sedgwick, where busy piers provided the background for a gritty street life. There were, for example, the nighttime transfers of cash and contraband liquor. And there were the bodies found beaten and riddled with bullets, the victims of gang violence. In 1946, an argument among a group of men on the docks left one longshoreman dead. In 1949, a car ran over a stevedore who was interviewing job applicants. On Christmas Eve that year, two armed men arrived 15 minutes too early to steal a $500 payroll from the Bloch Metal Stamping Company on Sedgwick Street. Rather than wait for the money to arrive, they took $100 from a company salesman. But life on the two streets was not always so grim. There was a playground on Sedgwick where, during the early 1900's, movies were screened for free every Thursday evening during the summer. There also was a floating hotel moored at the end of Sedgwick where two couples were once married on the same night. Now Irving and Sedgwick and their tales are all but gone, lost to the forward march of urban development. But if the efforts of some neighborhood preservationists are successful, Red Hook Lane, at least, may not be entirely lost to history. Mr. Pearsall and others are pressing the city to require that whatever is built over the street include something to commemorate the once bustling thoroughfare. "If we have a big office building built there, it wouldn't be that hard to run a lobby from north to south and Red Hook Lane could be memorialized in that way," Mr. Pearsall said, adding that it could resurrect some forgotten history. At the moment, he said, "Red Hook Lane is kind of a dead memory."

Posted by jtk at 08:28 PM | Permalink

Posted by jtk at 06:35 PM | Permalink

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/001782.php has a further update.

Posted by jtk at 12:28 PM | Permalink

from http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/001712.php
...theorists of jihad throughout Islamic history and today have taught that jihad must be fought to establish the hegemony of Sharia — under which Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims will have second-class status as dhimmis.

Posted by jtk at 08:40 AM | Permalink

From Dhimmi Watch

There could be a moose under there for all we know.

Posted by jtk at 08:37 AM | Permalink

From Cronana:

It looks like the "Muslimification" of Europe continues. They are now trying to regain access to a former Mosque in Spain. I tell you what if they let us worship in the Hagia Sofia. or in these other churches that were captured and converted to mosques:

St Nicholas Cathedral
St. John the Baptist in Syria and Ibn Tulun Mosque
St Helena's Cathedral in Aleppo

The main point being that we can't change history. We need to move forward not back. Why would you want to allow another religion into your house of worship, especially when that religion wants to wipe you out and create the "Great Caliphate" of "Eurabia"

More details from the Guardian

Posted by jtk at 08:31 AM | Permalink