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TARPON SPRINGS -- Amid the sounds of ancient liturgical chants, the spiritual leader of all Eastern Orthodox Christians presided over the largest Epiphany ceremony in North America on Friday. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I continued his historic visit to the Greek Orthodox community in central Florida, commemorating the centennial of the Epiphany ceremony in Tarpon Springs. More than 50,000 people were present for Friday's services, according to a report from Tarpon Springs police. It was the first time an Ecumenical patriarch visited Central Florida. "It is a great honor. It is something exciting," said Roula Roussos, a member of St. Sophia...

January 6, 2006 Weekday of the Christmas Season Psalm: Friday 4 Reading I1 Jn 5:5-13 Beloved:Who indeed is the victor over the worldbut the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one who came through water and Blood, Jesus Christ,not by water alone, but by water and Blood. The Spirit is the one who testifies,and the Spirit is truth. So there are three that testify,the Spirit, the water, and the Blood, and the three are of one accord. If we accept human testimony,the testimony of God is surely greater. Now the testimony of God...

In western Christian tradition, January 6 is celebrated as Epiphany. It goes by other names in various church traditions. In Hispanic and Latin culture, as well as some places in Europe, it is known as Three Kings’ Day ... Because of differences in church calendars, mainly between the Eastern Orthodox and the western Catholic and Protestant traditions, both Christmas and Epiphany have been observed at different times in the past. Today, most of the Eastern Orthodox traditions follow the western church calendar. ... Epiphany is the climax of the Christmas Season and the Twelve Days of Christmas, which are usually...

TARPON SPRINGS - Dress warm, get there early and be prepared for a massive crowd. That's the advice offered by organizers of the 100th annual Epiphany Day celebration, which promises to draw the biggest crowd ever. His All Holiness Bartholomew, the ecumenical patriarch of all Eastern Orthodox churches, will officiate at prayer services that begin at 7:30 a.m. today inside St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral. The patriarch will throw the cross into Spring Bayou at what for many is the highlight of Epiphany Day activities when more than 50 teenage boys dive into the 70-degree springwater to retrieve the holy...

CLEARWATER - For its 100th anniversary, the Tarpon Springs annual Epiphany Day celebration is going international. And it's doing so in a big way. His All Holiness Bartholomew, the ecumenical patriarch of all Eastern Orthodox churches, will travel from Istanbul, Turkey. High-ranking Orthodox clergy from around the world are expected to attend, as well as ambassadors to the United States from Greece, Turkey, Russia and Cyprus, representatives of the U.S. Senate and House and, possibly, the White House, said Bill Planes, chairman of the Patriarchal Centennial Visitation Committee. And when 53 teens, most of Greek descent, dive into the waters...

Rome, Jan. 05, 2006 (CNA) - This evening at six o’clock, as a tradition started by Pope Paul VI for the eve of the Solemnity of the Epiphany, Pope Benedict visited the garbage collectors of Rome at Porta Cavallegeri. Pope Benedict warned “not being lured by false appeals of what is ephemeral and not lasting. The warning comes from the Pontiff as he visited the nativity scene of garbage collectors at  Porta Cavallegeri. “It is not worth it just to stop and wait that things happen,” he warned.For Benedict XVI, “to visit the nativity scene specially this evening, the vigil...

TARPON SPRINGS -- Here at the end of a beaten brick road, beneath a canopy of live oaks and date palms is Spring Bayou, the center of the annual Orthodox Christian rite that has earned this small seaside town the name "Epiphany City." Year after year, tens of thousands of visitors descend upon Tarpon Springs for Epiphany, which begins today. It's a multiday festival of Greek folk culture and Orthodox ceremonies in honor of the baptism of Jesus Christ and the revelation of the Holy Trinity. Friday morning, onlookers from Tampa, Atlanta, Ontario and New York will funnel into the...

In its December 27, 2005 online edition, "El Vocero" newspaper from Puerto Rico reports that the governor of that U. S. Commonwealth has signed a bill assigning an annual $75,000 grant to help finance the Kings' Day (Epiphany) Festival which has been held every year since 1884 in the southern coastal town of Juana Díaz. The monies will be specifically allocated to the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture which, in turn, will provide them to a local private organization responsible for holding the Festival. To those fellow FReepers who are a little rusty on their Biblical history, the Epiphany is...

I am worn out from Christmas already, but am still looking forward to the "Little Christmas" in 11 days. While looking for a recipe for King's Cake, I came across a website that has a huge section on the customs of the liturgical year -- and the pages on Twelfthnight and the Feast of the Epiphany are too beautiful to not post here. On the Twelfthnight page, the information on the Magi and the Star of Bethlehem is especially interesting (who knew about the Orion symbolism?!). A quote (from the Twelfthnight page) by St. Ephraem on the Star of Bethlehem:...

Popular blogger who reveals exactly why he made the big switch. You don't seem to see any of these types of stories about Republicans switching though.

Change of heart on Iraq war By Ian Greenleigh Daily Texan Columnist As President Bush began to speak of a war in Iraq as if it was inevitable, countless Americans took to the streets in outrage. Hoping against hope, they attempted to sway the resolve of a notoriously stubborn leader - a colossal task that bore no fruit. I was one of these Americans. I was wrong. Amidst the endless reports of U.S. casualties, executive ineptitude and the seemingly slow rate of progress in Iraq, my about-face this late in the game may seem almost unthinkable. Indeed, millions of Americans...

Well fellow republicans, the title says it all. After a huge scuffle with a now ex friend (democrat), I am now a full blooded republican. I won't go into details why I decided to change, but I now see the light. Democrats are liars, deceiving, and very discriminative. I never thought I would consider myself as a republican, but I know believe. It will take some time for me to adjust and to rethink a lot of my positions on social issues, but I think we all know how they’ll change. But for the meantime, I have a lot of...

I find it personally insulting that the media has all but written President Bush's obituary in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately for the media, we have met the enemy and they are us. Many of us recognize that we have been our own worst enemies in our response to this disaster and the preparedness beforehand (the media included). The conduct of left wingers over the past several weeks has erased any lingering doubts in my mind as to why I have been leaning more toward the conservative side as each year passes. Any progressive views that I share with...

On February 18, 1997 I had an experience I've previously described as a "Vulcan Mind Meld with God." It was not the first time I'd been in touch with the Eternal. Forget Oh, God!, Bruce Almighty, and Joan of Arcadia. As delightful as they are, those stories are fiction. These events really happened to me. And for the first time, I'm telling my story in full. Of course you're free to make up your mind whether you think I'm telling the truth or not, and whether you believe I'm in my right mind or not. In over seventeen hours...

I actually felt myself become a republican today. It was around 10am, when I read the latest update of the Cindy Sheehan saga in CNN.com. I then shot over to read some blogs about it, and perused the comments in some of them, which was nothing but a long series of petty (albeit entertaining) partisan bickering. Then it happend. The good little democrat in me tied the little noose around his neck and jumped off the stool. He just couldn’t take it anymore. Take what? The whining. The constant whining by the extreme left about the reasons for war, the...

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/006422.shtml#more Guest Blog: Dude, Who Stole My Party? Guest poster Tom Glennon laments the loss of his Democratic Party. There's a lot of that going around. Dude, Who Stole My Party? by Tom Glennon I have a confession to make. It should be made public now, before Dan Rather and the 60 Minutes Team shows up at my door with documents about my past that, although forged, are still accurate. I admit, now and publicly, that I was a Democrat, for more years than I should have been. I was born just after World War II ended, so I am...

I still fight oppression The liberals who say I have deserted the left should ask themselves where they stand on Islamism Nick Cohen Sunday August 7, 2005 Observer Looking back on how his generation covered up the crimes of communism in the 1930s, WH Auden explained that he and his friends weren't true communists but fellow travellers. At home they defended civil liberties and stood up for freedom of speech. Abroad, they tolerated atrocities precisely because they didn't impinge on them. 'Our great error,' said Auden, 'was not a false admiration for Russia but a snobbish feeling that nothing which...

David Aikman's recent book, A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush, highlights the pivotal role religious faith plays in George W. Bush's life and presidency. The book chronicles Bush's slow ascendancy to his faith, taking note of the key people and seminal events that helped shape his Christian worldview. Aikman, a former senior correspondent for Time magazine, is an open Christian who is sympathetic to Bush's core religious principles. Aikman's work is the second one that touches on Bush's faith. Stephen Mansfield wrote the first, The Faith of George W. Bush, which was released last year,...

It took me a month to answer that question. According to the media, Tubingen is the German university where, in 1968, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- the future Pope Benedict XVI -- became a conservative. He did so, according to media accounts, because of left-wing student protests in 1968, when Ratzinger was a professor. Is that true? That a brilliant and deeply reflective theologian and priest simply freaked out over some student protests and became orthodox? Perhaps, but if so the more compelling question the media ignored is, if the protests changed Ratzinger, what exactly about them did it? The New...

On MSNBC Countdown last night, Mary Carey revealed just what went down at the National Republican Committee Senatorial dinner she attended this week.Carey: I think they can drink just as much. There were some really drunk guys by the end of the night. I was getting (joking) propositions for threesomes with mistresses. I was offered money from oil tycoons!It's pretty exciting, I didn't take any money or do any threesomes, but I was just suprised.I thought everyone would be stuck up and no one was going to like me. Instead, everyone loved me, got drunk and took pictures with me.So...

Leaving the left I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos. I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the...

I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity - Keith Thompson Sunday, May 22, 2005 Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos. I'm leaving the left...

THE MAKING OF A 9/11 REPUBLICAN Many of you were impressed with THE MAKING OF A 9/11 REPUBLICAN. It chronicled the transformation of writer Cinnamon Stillwell, who came from liberal Marin County and had her world changed forever on 9-11. Cinnamon will be my guest tomorrow on Rightalk Radio at 2pm Eastern. It will be a compelling hour of radio. The left is intolerant, not our side. RIGHTALK RADIO

February 24, 2005 The leader of the Lebanese opposition, a sharp critic of Washington foreign policy, says he's changed his view of the U.S. war in Iraq, seeing it now as a catalyst for democratic change across the Arab world. Walid Jumblatt Druze Muslim leader Walid Jumblatt, who is calling for an uprising against Lebanon's Syrian occupiers, is almost sounding like a neoconservative, says Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who interviewed him in Beirut Monday. "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," Jumblatt told the Post...

But more than anything, it was the left's hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at...

Living with European socialism turned this Berkeley girl into a conservative. I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose...

An MP who was a founder member of Labour Against the War has quit the group, saying that after last month’s elections in Iraq he now believed Allied troops should remain in the country, it emerged today. Harry Barnes’ defection will be welcomed by the Labour leadership, which fears that many of the party’s traditional supporters will stay at home in the forthcoming General Election because of anger over Iraq. The North-East Derbyshire MP, who is stepping down at the election, accused his former colleagues in the anti-war movement of retailing "simple-minded" claims about the extent of civilian casualties in...

As one of a handful of Bay Area conservative columnists, I'm no stranger to pushing buttons. Indeed, I welcome feedback from readers, whether positive or negative. I find the interplay stimulating, but I am often bemused by the stereotypical assumptions made by my critics on the left. It's not enough to simply disagree with my views; I have to be twisted into a conservative caricature that apparently makes opponents feel superior. They seem not to have considered that it's possible to put forward different approaches to various societal problems and not be the devil incarnate. But in some ways I...

RUSH: Here is Heather in Burbank. Hi, Heather. Welcome to the EIB Network. CALLER: Hi, Rush. I just want to let you know that I am the complete opposite of all those stories. You and my husband have inspired me to do two things. First off, I am a former liberal, daughter of a public schoolteacher, and family of feminazis and I was really laid off so what I've done last year is I converted to being a Republican and voted for Bush, whereas in 2000 I voted for Gore and I just recently started my own business so I'm...

The first step in any successful recovery program, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, is to admit that there is a problem. For a leftist, then, stepping out of denial is the beginning of a journey toward clearer thinking and political sanity. I approach this topic with only a hint of humor, because I myself am a recovered leftist, with over 25 years of sobriety. Was I drunk on left-wing propaganda? Yes, and I became a user at a very tender age – as a child, in fact, in the home of my parents, who schooled me in the...

The question, in its many variations a staple of Manhattan dinner parties, is invariably posed with bitter bewilderment: "How could anyone with a shred of decency call himself a conservative?" Alas, it is a question the book business has done a singularly poor job of answering. While publishers have fattened their bottom lines offering up red meat to true believers, the steady stream of invective from both left ("Liars!") and right ("Traitors!") has served only to widen the nation's yawning ideological divide. This is what makes Michael Medved's provocative memoir, "Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life," so welcome....

As I read the letter you posted today ("One more" February 3) I decided that I, too, must tell you about the difference your writing has made in my life. I hope I'm not too late--I've been thinking about writing to you for over a year, but I always talked myself out of it. Today I find myself compelled to tell you my own humble story. While I was raised in a fairly conservative family, I came of age during the '60s. I met my husband while we were both campaigning for Eugene McCarthy for president. We were married the...

I just watched a fascinating, but all too brief, interview with Rev. Ken Joseph Jr., an Assyrian Christian whose parents escaped Iraq in 1917, and later answered the call to help rebuild Japan. During the process that led up to the war in Iraq, Rev. Joseph was very vocal against the war on his radio program, and participated in demonstrations against it in Japan. He saw it as an unjust war against the people of Iraq, which were after all HIS people. He was so adamant in this position that he in fact became a human shield, in the hopes...

1962 Missal Mass Readings/Propers for the Second Sunday After the Epiphany Colors:  Green   INTROIT  Psalm 65:4 Let all the earth adore Thee, O God, and sing to Thee: let it sing a psalm to Thy Name, O Most High. -- (Ps.65. 1, 2). Shout with joy to God, all the earth, sing ye a psalm to His Name: give glory to His praise. V.: Glory be to the Father . . . -- Let all the earth adore Thee . . .   COLLECT - O almighty and everlasting God, who dost govern all things both in heaven...

Photo by: MARK GUSS Andrew McAdams, a junior at Berkeley Prep, emerges from Spring Bayou with the coveted white cross. "This means everything,'' he said. Tarpon Springs Welcomes Thousands To 99th Epiphany Celebration By ADAM EMERSON aemerson@tampatrib.com Published: Jan 8, 2005 TARPON SPRINGS - Standing outside St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Thursday morning, Andrew McAdams III showed no anxiety. He milled around with family and friends, preparing for the dive into Spring Bayou. Thousands of onlookers stood a quarter-mile away, waiting for McAdams and 42 other teenage boys to dive for the coveted white cross of the Epiphany. Cheering...

The Feast of the Epiphany occurs in the calendar of Tradition as it has from time immemorial, January 6. This is really the day on which we should be giving gifts to our family members and friends. The Church has long taught us that the Feast of the Epiphany symbolizes three distinct manifestations of Our Lord to the world. The first centers around the homage paid the Christ-child by the wise men from the East, the Magi. Our Lord's manifestation to them was His unfolding to the Gentile world, the world of unbelievers, that He was the true light of...

EPIPHANY - THREE KINGS Lovers of carols and Christmas parties know that this season has 12 days, packed with golden rings, calling birds and various kinds of gentry, musicians and domestic workers. December 25 is Christmas - and 25 minus 12 does equal 13. Do the math and you will see why shopping malls, newspapers, television networks, and other cultural fortresses annually deliver some kind of "Twelve Days of Christmas" blitz, beginning on December 13. Problem is that for centuries church calendars in the East and the West have agreed that there are twelve days of Christmas and they begin...

             Rev. Fr. Leonard Goffine'sThe Church's Year VIGIL OF EPIPHANY [The INTROIT, the COLLECT, and the EPISTLE, are the same as on the Sunday after Christmas.]GOSPEL (Mt. 2:19-23). At that time: when Herod was dead, be­hold an Angel of the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph in Egypt, saying: Arise, and take the child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead that sought the life of the child. Who arose, and took the child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel. But hearing that Archelaus reigned in Judea in...

The feast of the Epiphany, the adoration of Our Lord in Bethlehem by the “Magi from the East” (Matthew 7), shows us the value of representation and symbolism in the plans of Divine Providence. The Three Kings represented the Gentile peoples who would come to worship Christ. It is generally said that the Three Magi came to adore Our Lord as representatives of the Gentile peoples. It is also common to say that they were magi because they represented the ancient wisdom of the East paying homage to Our Lord Jesus Christ. Magus, a word derived from the Greek, means...

Someone gave me this book a few years ago, it's great as it tells the transformation of a liberal into a conservative after the birth of his child.It would be a good gift for someone teetering on the edge.

Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee by Ron Rosenbaum So I went up to the antiwar demonstration in Central Park this weekend, hoping to hear some persuasive arguments. After a couple of hours there, listening to speeches, reading the hate-America literature, I still don’t know what to think about Iraq—will an attack open a Pandora’s box, or close one?—but I think I know what I feel about this antiwar movement, or at least many of the flock who showed up in the Sheep Meadow. A movement of Marxist fringe groups and people who are unable to...

January 2, 2005Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord Psalm: Sunday 4 Reading IIs 60:1-6 Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem! Your light has come,the glory of the Lord shines upon you.See, darkness covers the earth,and thick clouds cover the peoples;but upon you the LORD shines,and over you appears his glory.Nations shall walk by your light,and kings by your shining radiance.Raise your eyes and look about;they all gather and come to you:your sons come from afar,and your daughters in the arms of their nurses. Then you shall be radiant at what you see,your heart shall throb and overflow,for the riches of...

CHRISTMAS AND EPIPHANY Sigrid Undset From our Lord's Birthday until Epiphany the Church keeps Christmas. The five joyful mysteries of the rosary, the antiphons and the prayers in the offices for Christmas, are the central point of our worship. Near the altar where He Himself lives clothed in the white garb of the Host, and where His mark, the crucifix, is placed over the tabernacle, there is now a crib—a little picture of the stable where the Word who became Flesh first opened His infant eyes. And round the little figure of the Christ Child stands the likeness of...

People often ask me when I stopped being a liberal and, depending on their own political persuasion, either saw the light or sold my soul to the devil.     The truth is, it was a fairly gradual process. I grew up in a typical middle-class Jewish home, the son of immigrants. In other words, Franklin Roosevelt was our patron saint. In our house, the feeling was that Mr. Roosevelt could walk -- or at least roll -- on water. When, after FDR's death, Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel, that clinched it. After 1948, if the Republicans had run God,...

As sun moves southward toward the winter solstice, my apparent sunrise actually becomes earlier; closer to the time listed in an almanac. In the summer the rising sun is blocked for several hours by hill to the northeast; in the winter sunrise is almost directly over the notch in the hills carved by a stream draining nearly two dozen square miles. For a few days at the end of November the morning sunrise streams through my office window, then through the narrow hallway leading to the rest of the house, above the kitchen counter-wall before coming to rest squarely on...

Just wanted to introduce myself, I stumbled on this place quite by accident and am quite pleased that I did. I was a Democrat all my life, and voted as such since the time I was 18. I wasnt really into politics, I just voted Democrat all the way down the line because my mom always said "The Democrats are for the poor people, and the Republicans are for the rich, and thats what my mother told me" I voted for Clinton TWICE!! (This is where I am hanging my head) 9-11 was a real wake up call for me....

I was raised as a liberal in the era of a patriotic Democratic Party. But the present party and its presidential candidate John Kerry are a source of great disappointment to me and to millions of other former Democrats. That once-honored party has now turned dangerously leftward, establishing itself as the anti-American party, creating an unprecedented defeatist, disloyal opposition. Even during the Vietnam War, there were individual protests, but both parties refused to play partisan politics as long as America faced a difficult struggle. Today the historic credo that the opposition should not give comfort to the enemy has been...

Everyday my wife lives in the REAL WORLD, not college, she is more convinced that those once thought heartless Republicans are actually right. When in college in 1992, she voted for Clinton. She had somewhat lived her life in a bubble - parents were wealthy, she did not have to work too hard, and she was a proud liberal. Since she has gotten out of college in 1995, she has learned that when you actually have to support yourself it's not so fun to pay a lot of taxes. When a liberal, she thought the "rich" people should pay a...

New York, NY (LifeNews.com) -- Democratic senator Zell Miller is the featured keynote speaker at the third night of the Republican Party convention. His speech concludes a remarkable change from a pro-abortion governor who nominated abortion advocate Bill Clinton for president to a pro-life senator who supports pro-life President George W. Bush. Miller writes in his book, "A National Party No More," that he begin to change his mind on abortion with the birth of his great grandchildren. "I believe the thinking of many Americans is changing on this subject," he writes. "New science and technology can now show the...

Dad?!” my teenage daughter’s face reflected a queasy mixture of surprise and instinctive revulsion. “Is it true? Are you really a . . . Republican?” She uttered the word as if it were a deadly disease that she could catch just by naming it. “I’m a conservative,” I corrected her. “But are you really going to vote for . . . George Bush?” I had never spoken to Lily about my politics—nor about my strange and eventful journey from Upper West Side liberal to neoconservative culture warrior. For a long time she was simply too young, and when she got...