JBeyond ☦️

St. Dumitru Stăniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 2 , pp. 111-112: “Since, before sin, the human being existed with God and neighbor in a harmony that was, so to speak, natural even if it had not yet been consolidated by means of the virtues acquired through his own deeds he also found himself in harmony with nature. His gentleness did not keep the animals from coming close to him. His greed neither defiled nor degraded nature. Because he saw God everywhere in nature, he had the feeling of being in it as in a cradle, and he did not destroy the protective mystery it wove around him by unraveling it with analyses and delvings. Through nature itself he saw beyond nature, and the force of his innocent spirit lent malleability to nature’s processes. A great feeling of solidarity with all things granted him a peace with all things. It would have been possible for humans to have become the “link” joining God and the whole of nature, according to the image of St. Maximus the Confessor. In direct contrast with the conceptions of pantheism, the human being is not destined to lose his individuality or to meld together with the cosmos into some impersonal whole, but on the contrary, the human being is the one who is to make of the world a personal reality. Man no longer saves himself through the universe, but the universe is saved through man. For man is the hypostasis of the whole cosmos, which participates in his nature. And the earth finds its personal meaning, hypostatic in man… The world follows man, since it is like him in nature: “the anthroposphere,” one could say. And this anthropocosmic link is accomplished when that of the human image is accomplished, with God its prototype… We are therefore responsible for the world. We are the word, the logos, through which it bespeaks itself, and it depends solely on us whether it blasphemes or prays. Only through us can the cosmos, like the body that it prolongs, receive grace. For not only the soul, but the body of man is created in the image of God. It is only through the agency of the human person that the cosmos, which by origin is a “Logosphere,” can become a “Christosphere” and a “Pneumatosphere.”

A never-before-seen owl has been found in the USA. While snowy owls are known for their white feathers, this owl, nicknamed "Rusty" by locals, has an unexplained reddish-orange appearance.

Much has been written about the nature of Constantinople’s primacy within the Orthodox Church. Most recently, the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate published an essay titled, “What Does It Mean that the Ecumenical Patriarch is ‘First Among Equals’?” (The name of the author or authors was not given.) This essay contained many truths, but also a number of inaccuracies and even a few lies. Rather than write a line-by-line rebuttal, we present the following five-point exposition on the primacy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, making occasional reference to the Archons’ essay as well as other pro-Phanar sources. It should be noted that the following is not meant as an attack upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate or His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, whom we hold in the highest respect. Rather, it is a critique of certain theories about the Constantinopolitan primacy, many of which are not even advanced by the Ecumenical Patriarch himself.