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Episode 314 - The Divine Liturgy with Father John Strickland

November 24, 2024·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Father Strickland explains how the Sunday service in Washington today mirrors what was served in Constantinople a millennium ago.

The subject is liturgy. The host starts with the basic problem: Christianity defines Byzantium against its pagan Roman past, so Orthodoxy deserves a slower look. He also starts from admitted ignorance. His Church of England background was low Anglican, informal, modern, and lively, but far from ritual and procession. Father John Strickland comes in as an Orthodox pastor in Poulsbo, Washington, and a historian of Christian civilisation. The conversation stays practical. Strickland describes a worshipping community where people ideally arrive catechized enough to know what the service is doing. Then he complicates it. Some churches have trained choirs, baptized people who were never taught much, and congregations that take part less fully than the ideal suggests. The host pushes on posture. If worship partly acts out faith, standing rather than sitting cannot be neutral. Strickland is careful here. He does not dismiss sitting, since his own seated Protestant worship mattered to him spiritually. But architecture teaches. In Russia, and in much of the old Orthodox world he describes, formal pews are uncommon. Pews become a clue to a newer liturgical habit, tied to the Protestant Reformation and a different idea of worship. Orthodox worship comes across as participation in God's presence; some Protestant worship puts more weight on reflection and scriptural instruction. The episode ends by turning to Strickland's Paradise and Utopia project, a wide history that moves through Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, totalitarian regimes, liberalism, progressivism, and the present.

As heard by us

A careful, accessible introduction to Orthodox worship and the world it grew from.

The episode uses worship as the opening frame for Orthodox liturgy, and Robin's Protestant, low Anglican background gives Father John Strickland a useful contrast point.

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Why you'd press play

Start here if you want Orthodoxy explained through the Divine Liturgy, without the fog.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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