Today we give thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ for the holy icons that fill our churches with His beauty. But this is part of a larger celebration. In this feast we celebrate the triumph of Orthodoxy over all heresies. So let us consider why this is important. In a world where people believe so many different things, why does it matter what we believe?

St. Gregory the Theologian says that as Christians we undergo three births. The first is our physical birth from our mother, when we are born into the life of this world. The second is our baptism, when we are reborn through water and the Holy Spirit as members of the body of Christ. The third birth is the resurrection, when all of us hope to be born anew into the Kingdom of Heaven.¹ At this glorious feast we honor the most holy Mother of God and celebrate her new birth into the resurrection. We pray that by our Lord’s grace, and through her prayers, we may one day be with her where she has gone before us.

People often wonder what attitude the Church should have toward feminism. It may be easy to offer simplistic answers, but we cannot begin to address this issue responsibly unless we are clear about what feminism is. This contentious word feminism means different things to different people, both among its advocates and among its opponents. For many today, including many Orthodox Christians, “feminist” has become a convenient insult largely empty of meaning. If people can pin the label of feminist on people or ideas they dislike, they can dismiss those people and ideas without having to give them a hearing. This can be an excuse for refusing to enter into respectful dialogue with others, thus avoiding the possibility of discovering whether they actually have legitimate concerns, and maybe even changing our own attitudes or behavior in response. Sometimes God uses the most unlikely people and situations to call us to repentance.

As human persons, men and women are created in the image of God. The Church Fathers have shown that many aspects of our humanity reveal the divine image, notably our ability to perceive God's presence and the spiritual realm, our intellect, our freedom of choice, and our capacity to enter into communion with God and live lives of goodness and love. These characteristics belong to every human being as such. But the leading twentieth-century Orthodox theologians have emphasized another aspect of human identity that has tremendous importance: to be made in the image of God is to be made in the image of the Holy Trinity; like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, human beings are persons.

In the time of the ancient Church fathers, people asked many theological questions. One of them was, “Since God did not want Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, why did he plant it in the middle of Paradise in the first place?” It could seem as if God was setting a trap for the first human beings, something that would trip them up to make them get in trouble so they could be punished. Sometimes people make rules that work like this, but God never acts this way. His purposes are always good, never deceptive or malicious.