The St. Nina Quarterly www.stnina.org/0/0-00.htm

A journal for and by Eastern Orthodox Women and other interested people, published quarterly by the Women's Orthodox Ministries & Education Network (WOMEN), an international organization dedicated to exploring, celebrating, and cultivating the rich and diverse gifts of women and men in the Orthodox Church.

Our mission is to discover and cultivate these gifts for the nurturance of the entire Body of Christ. To this end, we will strive to educate, to inform, and to provide space for an ongoing, creative dialogue aimed at reaching across all boundaries; to support and encourage the growth and vitality of the God-given ministries of all our sisters and brothers in Christ.

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Some really interesting articles...particulary enjoying the one about St. Brigit of Kildare (one of my patrons) and "The Significance of the Maleness of Jesus Christ."

The author writes:

Harrison rightly recognized that, "if Christ saves as male, half of the human race is excluded from salvation."

I've been saying this for some time, but this is the first time I've heard it from someone else.

Thanks!
~Empiress

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Some Characteristic Features of Orthodoxy
by Fr. Prof. Dr. Staniloae Dimitru

It is a fact that Orthodoxy is identical in its faith-content and worship with the faith-content and worship of primitive Christianity. Yet the extraordinary and absolutely genuine fact about it is that, while being essentially the continuation of the faith, worship, and spirituality of the undivided Church of the first centuries, Orthodoxy meets in a perfect manner, the spiritual need of the people who have remained loyal to it down to this day.

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The intellectual definitions and the doctrinal expositions whereby the West has tried (and still tries) to replace the exposition of mystery by way of symbols have their point of origin in the conviction that this mystery can be expressed exactly in human words.

In reality this mystery is narrowed down or even diluted wherever one wishes to encapsulate it in the strict meaning of words and intellectual definitions. The paradoxical and apophatic fullness of the mystery of salvation is more exactly rendered by symbols.

Ôo speak of the Cross and Resurrection in a general way, to contemplate them in icons, to express them in symbolic and liturgical gestures suggests in a more realistic and existential way the mystery of salvation than does the satisfaction theory of Anselm or the poenal theory of the Protestants who are able to express but one aspect of the incomprehensible mystery of salvation.

If Orthodoxy needs to accommodate itself to the needs of contemporary man, it cannot consist in a total reduction of the symbolic expression. It can only consist in a simplification of this expression in order to see straight away the great symbols of the Christian mystery which correspond to the great, simple, permanent, evidences and spiritual necessities of man. Namely: God near to us as human person; resurrection through the Cross; glory through humility; power to restrain oneself, and patience; freedom through grace; the value of this life through faith in the hereafter; individuality through communion; development of one's own personality through self-denial, and so on.

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