Christina Andresen and Emma Solak discuss the new Amazon Prime show, Good Omens. They discuss how we are all fallen, the battle between heaven and hell, and whether or not the gospel falls flat for those in comfort. They close with their Top 5 Gangs of Kids.

This week the girls revisit the critically acclaimed Amazon Prime show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. They discuss the need to be clear on our lives priorities, how where we are shapes who we become, and how each of us is called to follow Christ authentically. They close with their Top 5 Songs Released in 1960.

This week, the guys take to Zoom before a live digital audience to discuss the classic movie, Groundhog Day! They discuss life under quarantine, how the divine desires the salvation of all, and how change occurs in the heart. The close with some Q&A;! Make sure to join every week at www.y2am.org/PopCultureLive!

The girls discuss the poetry of Amanda Gorman, the young poet who read her work at the inauguration and Super Bowl. They discuss themes of light and darkness, the way burdens can be inherited, and a vision of God's Kingdom.

Christina and Steve watched the new film about Saint Nektarios, "Man of God." Spoilers ahead! They explore struggle, salvation, and the choice to live as faithful Christians.

It's been a wild ride, and now, after seven years, Christina, Steve, Emma, and Christian gather for the final episode Pop Culture Coffee Hour. They discuss the high points of the last 200 episodes, play some games, and have a whole lot of laughs. Listener voicemails and blooper reels abound in this series finale. Join the Wonder Twins and Headscarf Mafia as they lovingly say goodbye to the podcast and the faithful thirteen. All this and the introduction of a brand new, canine-based childhood curriculum. Agni Parthene (Dance & Do Not Sin Remix) was written and produced by Jim John Marks of Generative Sounds; this song and his other works can be found at generativesoundsjjm.bandcamp.com.

The story of the Good Samaritan calls us to treat everyone as our neighbor through the love of God for the whole world.

Fr. Philip remembers St. Gregory Palamas by calling us to bring our whole personhood - body, soul and spirit - into our relationship with God.

How do we break free from the paralysis of our own sin and brokenness? The disciplines of Lent are tools given to us to help us move towards our own salvation.

"Loving our neighbors as ourselves foreshadows the blessedness of the Kingdom where there are no hated foreigners."

Fr. Philip LeMasters helps us to understand the deeper meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan so that we too can live the Gospel with our Neighbor.

Fr. Philip LeMasters reflects upon the significance of the ascension of Jesus into the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

Lenten practices are not instruments of punishment or legalism, but blessed tools for becoming more fully our true selves as living icons of God.

As odd as it will sound to many in our culture, Christ does not call us to become successful or powerful by earthly standards, including those of our own society. He calls us to shine with holiness such that His glory radiates through us and illumines a world darkened by sin and death. Doing so requires that we do not rest content with being good citizens or moral people, regardless of how those terms are defined.

In response to Christ’s statement about how hard it is for rich people to enter the Kingdom of God, the disciples were amazed and asked, “Who then can be saved?” The Lord responded, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” That is true not only for the wealthy, but for us all.

As we celebrate the Exaltation of the Cross, let us examine ourselves to see if our lives appear foolish and scandalous by the standards of the world because of our faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

Instead of obsessing over how we measure up, we should simply focus all our energies on finding healing for our passions as we reorient our disordered desires for fulfillment in God. If we persist in doing so and call out for the Lord’s mercy whenever we stumble and fall, we will come to know the joy of those liberated from the tomb, clothed in the divine glory, and finally in our right minds.

Joachim, Anna, and the Theotokos were the complete opposites of the rich man in today’s gospel reading. His only concern was to eat, drink, and enjoy himself because he had become so wealthy. He was addicted to earthly pleasure, power, and success, and saw the meaning and purpose of his life only in those terms. In stark contrast, the Theotokos followed the righteous example of her parents. She was prepared by a life of holiness to agree freely to become our Lord’s mother.

As we prepare to receive the Lord in faith at Christmas, we must use our freedom to follow St. Paul’s instruction in today’s epistle reading: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”

The path to eternal life runs through our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to overlook, disregard, and even despise. How we treat the hungry and thirsty, the stranger and the naked, the sick and the prisoner reveals the true state of our souls. How we serve our suffering and inconvenient neighbors, whoever they are, is how we serve our Lord.

Christ has ascended. Let us go up together with Him as we find liberation from slavery to our passions and share more fully in the salvation that He has brought to the world.

Today we celebrate the restoration of our true unity in God.

We must live distinctive lives that draw others to share in the divine healing that our Lord has made available to all.

Like the saints we remember today, let us turn away from such distractions and instead orient ourselves toward the blessedness of a Kingdom that remains not of this world. Let us offer all our blessings back to Him with gratitude, for that is the only way to live as those who know that the good things of this life are not ends in themselves, but points of entrance to eternal life.

The Feast of Christ’s Transfiguration calls each of us to nothing less than to be transfigured in holiness and shine brilliantly by grace with the light of heaven.

If we want to know Christ as the beloved disciple did, then we must learn that our very life is in our brothers and sisters. Loving them and Christ in them is the only way to find liberation from fear in our world of corruption, for it is fear that separates us from one another and keeps us from becoming together the uniquely beautiful persons our Lord created us to become in His image and likeness.

If we have received the Lord’s mercy, we must extend that mercy to our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to hate, condemn, or otherwise disregard.

Icons certainly beautify the church, but not simply in the conventional sense of being aesthetically pleasing. Instead, they manifest visually that the Son of God has called and enabled us to become His beautiful living icons. They show that the Savior has made us participants by grace in His deified humanity so that we may shine brightly with the divine glory.

We do not adore the Holy Cross today because it is useful for serving any personal, cultural, or political agenda. We do so because the Savior has brought eternal life to the world through His victory over the corrupting power of sin and death.

As we prepare for the Dormition Fast and look forward to the feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord, we must recognize how much we remain like the blind and mute men in our gospel reading.

By the grace of our Lord, we may become the light of the world as we do what the world does not prize: praying in secret; struggling to fast as we best we can; giving generously to the needy without drawing attention to ourselves; forgiving and praying for those who wrong us; mindfully rejecting the temptation to praise ourselves or to condemn anyone else; and confessing and repenting of our sins on a regular basis.

Lent does not call us merely to think or have feelings about our Lord’s Cross and resurrection. This season invites us to grow in our personal knowledge and experience of the Savior Who offered Himself on the Cross and rose in glory on the third day for our salvation.

Today we celebrate the restoration of our true unity in God through the unifying power of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter sent by the risen and ascended Savior Who is seated at the right hand of the Father in heavenly glory.

There is a temptation in pursuing the Christian life to think that we are more faithful than we actually are because we have confused lesser goals for our true calling. Then we can pat ourselves on the back for achieving far less than what the God-Man has made possible for us as “partakers of the divine nature.”

St. Basil the Great, who gave away his great wealth to found philanthropic ministries for the sick and needy, taught that the Lord’s strict words to this man revealed his lack of love for his neighbors. Basil wrote that “Those who love their neighbors as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor; yet surely, you seem to have great possessions! How else can this be, but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolation of the many…For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.” The young ruler had laid up treasures for himself on earth and had given his heart to them. (Matt. 6: 19-21)

By faith in Christ, we have become the new tenants of the vineyard with an obligation to “give him the fruits in their seasons.” That, of course, is precisely what the original tenants refused to do. Instead of tending the vineyard and offering its fruit to their rightful owner, they wanted everything for themselves and even killed the son of the owner in order to take his inheritance. We must read this passage as a reminder that, in order to be good tenants of the Lord’s vineyard, we must offer ourselves in union with His great Self-Offering on the Cross for the salvation of the world.

In the midst of the ongoing tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land, we must attend to the wisdom of our father in Christ, His Beatitude Patriarch John X of Antioch, who stated this week that “Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace…” He writes that we pray “for peace in the entire world, for stability, and for the repose of the souls of those who have passed away. We pray that the wounds of the sick be soothed and they might recover, for the wounds of every hurting person, every bereaved mother, every brother, and every sister, for everyone’s wounds. We ask the Lord to protect us and grant us peace…”

St. Irenaeus wrote that “The glory of God is a man fully alive, and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Adv. haer. 4.20.7).” To be a human person is to bear the image of God with the calling to become more like Him in holiness. The more we do so, the more we become our true selves. The God-Man Jesus Christ came to restore and fulfill us as living icons of God. He enables us to become truly human as we participate personally in Him as the Second Adam. As St. Paul wrote, “For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.” (2 Cor. 1:20)

It is terribly tragic when people fall into the delusion of thinking that they love God and neighbor, when in reality they are using religion to serve only themselves and the false gods of this world. One symptom of doing so is to narrow down the list of people who count as our neighbors to the point that we excuse ourselves from serving Christ in all who bear His image and likeness. When we do so, we disregard not only them, but our Lord Himself, the God-Man born for the salvation of all. Our actions then reveal that we are not truly united with Him because we seek to justify ourselves by serving nothing but our own vain imaginations.

Today we continue to celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of a poor family, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” The aged prophetess St. Anna also recognizes Him as the fulfillment of God’s promises.

Today we continue to celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of a poor family, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” The aged prophetess St. Anna also recognizes Him as the fulfillment of God’s promises.

Today we begin the Lenten Triodion, the three-week period of preparation for the spiritual journey that prepares us to follow Christ to His Cross and victory over death at Pascha. The first step in our preparation is to remember that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (Jas. 4:6) Today the Church reminds us of how easy it is to distort the spiritual disciplines of Lent in a fashion that makes them nothing but hindrances to the healing of our souls. Today we are warned that it is entirely possible to distort prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and other spiritual disciplines according to our own pride such that these tools of salvation become nothing but instruments for rejecting the healing mercy of the Savior.

What was the genius of classical music during its nineteenth-century golden age? According to Fr. John Strickland, it was an effort to rescue Christendom's transformational imperative in an age when secularization threatened to sever earth from heaven. No longer influenced by traditional Christianity, great composers like Beethoven exaggerated earthly passions (especially sexual love) to communicate the West's primordial desire for transcendence. But the emotionalism that resulted threatened to take the floor out from underneath them. This episode concludes by analyzing famous works by Schubert and Berlioz which show how transcendence gave way to descent, and how utopian hopes plunged into irreversible spiritual agony.

Most Americans know Tchaikovsky as the composer of the delightful dances contained within the Nutcracker Ballet. As Fr. John Strickland shows, however, there is much more to be heard in their melodies, and little that was delightful about the emotionally agonized life behind them. Using selections from a variety of works, he explores how the romantic agony came for Tchaikovsky in his boyhood and thereafter never departed. Special attention is given to an analysis of the famous Sixth Symphony, nicknamed Pathetique. First performed just days before the composer's abrupt death, the work brings the generation of the romantics to a heart-rending and emblematic conclusion.

In his continued account of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fr. John discusses the megalomaniac philosopher's effort to replace the Gospel with an atheistic "transvaluation of all values."

In a world which feasts and frenzies on the bad news and misfortunes of others, Fr. John Parker encourages us to keep ever before us the truly and eternal Good News: that Jesus Christ became man and took on flesh for the salvation of the world.

Fr. Josiah Trenham speaks about the connection between church building consecration and people consecration at a clergy retreat for the Carolina Deanery of the Orthodox Church in America.

Fr. John speaks with Bishop Gregory, Primate of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of the U.S.A. "Don't think about joining a mission team, just get on the mission team and go."

Fr John shares a few nuggets of Gospel living which he heard from a kindhearted Delivery Man, Michael, who came to deliver a playground set to Holy Ascension.

Fr. John Parker speaks on the Orthodox view on who goes to Hell, through the perspective of Fr. Lawrence Farley.