Orthodox Biz Blog

A few months ago I was working in a soup kitchen. One client—we’ll call her Kathy—had a glazed look in her eyes. I tried to talk with her, but she was in her own world. If you have ever had the joy of working at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, you have met individuals like Kathy; people who, for whatever reason, can’t communicate coherently with others.

The Orthodox tradition recognizes numerous saints of a certain type: Fools for Christ. These individuals, like Kathy, had difficulty relating to others “normally.” Yet the Church in her holy wisdom found it appropriate not only to accept such individuals, it actually recognized them as truly saintly men and women, inspired by God.

This raises the question: what, according to our faith, is “normal"?

Though I rarely have time to watch TV, the other night I did catch a rather intriguing episode of Animal Planet. It seems that in the high dry interior of Kenya, there was rumor of a lioness who was keeping company with an antelope. An animal expert traveled to the game reserve to see if there was any truth to the rumor. She did, indeed, find an adolescent lioness who seemingly had abandoned her

When a European journalist based in Ammam Jordan calls a writer in Central Florida for a comment on church bombings in Mosul, only to end up on a conference call with an Assyrian activist in Beirut - you know things have changed. The world is just not the same.

According to CIO magazine, a recent survey of over 200 CIO's for medium and small enterprises revealed that 83% of them were leveraging some kind of Web 2.0 technology. That is excellent news for those of us who are into the Web design space and don't care much for static Websites.

Unfortunately, many business professionals and Christian ministers will read that statistic and ask, "What is Web 2.0?"

This week I'm starting an 8-week telephone course with Susan Sly called Marketing Bootcamp. Now I never took a business class, unless you count Economics as a senior in high school 46 years ago. Economics comes from the Greek for taking care of your own house. The Church uses economia (economy) in efficiently and fairly solving problems.

One fall evening in 1954, a car sped through dusky Pennsylvania twilight. Headlights off, it careened recklessly towards a blind intersection in a cornfield. In a sickening split second, it smashed broadside into another car.

There were three people in that second car. When the dust and smoke cleared, two bodies lay among the twisted metal. One was my mother, who would remain in a coma for a month. The other, my aunt, was killed instantly. My father escaped with only scratches. Looking up to the sky, he asked “Why us, God? We were on our way to be missionaries!”

Like a lot of other Orthodox Christians who spent time in a Greek parish, I've done my share of festival duty. Several years in the Gyros booth, a couple in the parish bookstore, one doing church tours - been there done that.