FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN

What's wrong with us isn't a rap sheet of bad deeds, but a damaged heart, a soul-sickness, that plunges us into fearful self-protection, alienation from God and others.

Women and men just aren't that different. Oh, we're different in some intriguing ways, and it can be fun to band together for all-gal or all-guy projects. But when it comes to the tragic mess Christ came to heal, we're pretty much the same.

Someone who wanted to challenge Orthodoxy would not be able to locate a building to hold a protest march in front of. The faith is too diffused.

Easter may seem boring to children, and it is blessedly unencumbered by the silly fun that plagues Christmas. Yet it contains the one thing needful for every human life: the good news of Resurrection.

Somehow we just don't make the same boisterous fun of Holy Week that we do of Christmas. No one plans to have a holly, jolly Easter.

The devil's main purpose is not to scare us, in a horror-movie way; when we're scared of him, we're alert to him, and that might undermine his plans. Instead, he wants to quietly, subtly lure us into stepping away from God.

The Christmas story has such power and such appeal every year. There are other stories we get tired of. You think of your favorite movie; you don't want to watch it 15 times.

I know by experience that Jesus Christ is a very powerful spirit - I know by experience that he is probably the most powerful spirit in the universe. I know by experience he is not a mere human being. He is something beyond that.

God's presence is not just Light, and Life, but Love. And Love invites, but does not compel.

Jesus showed us how to be courageous and sacrificial while we die for our beliefs, not while we kill for them.

Temptation coaxes us toward sin, and sin leads to sickness and death, and ultimately confinement in the realm of the evil one.

The Church's teaching isn't an official statement, but the cumulative understanding of all the people who have loved and experienced Jesus through time.

The Orthodox hierarchy doesn't have the kind of power that high-ranking clergy do in other churches. There isn't even a worldwide governing board to hold all the various Orthodox bodies together.

God is not looking for repayment, but repentance. What heals a broken relationship is sincere love and contrition.

Of the seven deadly sins, anger has long been the one with the best box of costumes. When the guy in the next car rages at you, he's dangerous. When you rage at him, you're just. We can usually recognize the results of anger, especially in others, as destructive and evil.

After I graduated from college, while traveling around Europe, hitchhiking, doing the tourist thing, I went into a church in Dublin.

Women don't need to have our own little corner of the church where we can feel precious or, alternatively, cranky. In every essential thing, as far as life in Christ is concerned, the differences between men and women are irrelevant.

My mother was an unbeliever - and still is. My father was a nominal Catholic. We would go in to church at the last minute before the gospel reading, take Communion, and walk right out again.

People don't do theology in a vacuum but in a community with other theological thinkers, where there's jealousy, vanity, hurt pride, all those things.

You can latch onto theological ideas that are, in fact, not accurate, and refuse to let them go. I think we've seen this a few times in church history.

It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold.

There are lots of things to like about being Eastern Orthodox - incense, liturgies, all the baklava you can eat - but you know what I like best? None of that stupid 'women's ministry' stuff.

Lots of Orthodox go to church every Sunday but don't know much about the faith. Yet they know that there is something that they don't know much about.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.