Frederica

July 6 is the feast of the St. Sisoes, the Desert Father (d. 429). This icon recalls the time he saw the broken tomb and bones of Alexander the Great. This is what is written on the icon: Sisoes, the great among ascetics, stood before the tomb of Alexander, Emperor…

Back in the 80’s I was living in Woodbridge, Virginia, which was still its own little town and not yet a commuter suburb of D.C. I used to visit the Salvation Army on Rt. 1, and one day I passed by a big bin of curtains and noticed something embroidered…

Leaping into Light Springing from her lap he leaps, my father, into light; Grandmother holds him tight; and Grandad penned the frame with time: “MAR 30-1926” and birthday “7-MONTHS.” But all this fails to hold him back: he leaps to clear the frame with head tipped back and arms spread…

For Father’s day, cartoonist Ellis Rosen offered a series of pictures featuring his dad. True confessions: Sometimes I buy the celebrity magazines in the grocery store check-out line. I have no idea who those people are, but I like looking at them. Their lives are hard—chained to a life lived…

My son Sdn David Mathewes posted this image on his Facebook page, and it troubled me—I felt obscurely that someone had made it to mock tough-guy Orthodox Christians. On the contrary, it’s one in a series of a hundred or more paintings by the Russian artist Andrei Bodko. The series…

My husband just told me we’d have a memorial trisagion for Tommy on Sunday, so I’d needed to make koliva. That reminded me of the big events of two years ago, early June of 2024. Tommy My husband, Fr. Gregory, had been planning a short trip to our home town,…

This video is incisive and deeply persuasive—I kept thinking, “Why, yes, that’s true.” «WHEN THE SOUL IS TIRED There is a kind of exhaustion sleep cannot touch. You can rest your body and still wake up inwardly crowded. Not broken enough to stop functioning. Just too scattered to pray, too…