Orthodox Biz Blog

I was watching Nick Junior with my kids in my parents' living room when I saw a police officer walking across the yard. I went out the backdoor, and realized that three more were already roaming around my parents' ten acres of property. I walked up to the police officer that had just arrived.

In an article on Orthodox Biz in May 2010, I predicted the demise of Protestantism. That seemed outrageous to many of my readers, who were not at all shy about sending me emails questioning my sanity. Of the approximate 2 billion Christians in the world today, 648 million or so are Protestants, with most of those being Evangelicals. The idea that hundreds of millions of Protestant Christians will convert to some other religion seems far-fetched in the extreme. Over the short term, I agree that this is impossible. But I think the trend is there, and the next hundred years is going to see a massive shift in Christianity around the globe. That shift, in my opinion, will be away from Protestantism and towards Orthodoxy on a massive scale.

Protestantism in the United States is under relentless, sustained attack. An attack so serious that it threatens to sweep Protestantism, as a movement, into the dustbin of history. Unfortunately for the various Protestant Churches, many of their own Theologians are inadvertently providing aid and comfort to the enemy in this struggle. Of course, it doesn't help at all that the men attacking Protestantism so ferociously have been dead for almost 2,000 years.

I get a lot of questions about using Facebook and Twitter for promoting businesses and ministries. In this brief blog, I'm going to sum up some of the advice I often give clients on how to leverage the Social Media trend.

Social Media are sites like Facebook and Twitter where people share information and interact with each other. On sites like this, people talk to each other via instant messaging and interact using posts, rather than passively consuming content that has been prepared for them. The trick is to get them talking and interacting about you.

I just got in a whole collection of children's books from Potamitis Publishing, and found myself blown away!

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, “Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither.” Even though they talk almost obsessively about the Founding Fathers, this simple truth has been totally lost on Republicans for decades. The trend has accelerated since 9/11, but "law and order" as a Republican wedge issue dates back to at least Nixon.

My son is eight. Our normal bedtime routine is to read chapters from great novels and have short discussions on them before turning out the light. We recently finished up Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. The book deals with a lot of grown-up topics, and we used it as a springboard to discuss all kinds of issues, but especially the nature of crime, punishment, and torture.

In the book, Esméralda is accused of killing Captain Phoebus and of witchcraft. Since she refused to confess, she was taken to the dungeon to be tortured into confessing.

Knowing that she was just a young girl, my son sat up and asked, “Dad, who is going to torture her?”

“They’re Catholic priests,” I replied.

“They can't be real priests,” my son replied, “Real priests couldn't do that.”

Mary was a sixth-century hooker in the Eastern Roman Empire. She had been one from her youth. She wasn’t in it for the money, as she told a monk named Zosimas later in life, but "out of insatiable desire”. One day she saw the crowds of pilgrims preparing to go to Jerusalem, to celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. She decided to go with them, out of curiosity perhaps. She went along, announcing to her fellow-travelers, "I have a body and that will serve as both fare and food for me". The trip was an eventful one, as Mary put her body to prodigious use with her fellow travelers.

An Evangelical friend of mine of was complaining about his kid learning Chinese history in school. He was incensed that his son would learn "foreign history" instead of "Western history." I laughed and then infuriated him when I said, "For your kid, Western history is just as foreign."

When President George W. Bush was in office, I was a flaming liberal. I opposed the Iraq War on a host of grounds, not the least of which was the Constitutional requirement that only Congress (not the president) could declare war.

I was critical of Bushian fiscal policies from profligate spending to steel tariffs to farm subsidies. I was bitterly opposed to the PATRIOT Act and other curtailments on the freedoms ordinary Americans enjoy. The various ideas coming out of the Justice Department about the ‘unitary executive' made my skin crawl, and please don't get me started at a party on the problems with torture and the ability to declare American citizens to be enemy combatants.

A friend of mine asked me why I got a reconditioned Mac for my wife, instead of a new PC that was available from a box store for less money.

"Simple," I said, "I don't have time to play tech support."

When was the last time that your image presentation in Virtuemart actually wowed a client? Okay, the default image handling isn't too bad. You get a thumbnail, which pops up into a lightbox. If you need multiple images, then you get a stack of thumbnails on the product details page - which also pop up into lightboxes.

Frankly, it's all a little ho-hum to say the least. Much of what we sell on our CorShops site is actually software, so we don't need the images so much. After all, we can demo the software and that helps sell the sizzle. But most of our development clients sell physical products, and they need to put these in the best possible light. And that light is usually not a 'lightbox,' which is why we created the FlyTabs Virtuemart Theme.

Virtuemart is a great shopping cart, but the core system has three big problems when it comes to handling images. First, the default option on a Category page is that clicking the product image thumbnail pops up a bigger image, instead of leading to the product details!

That just makes people mad. Online shoppers normally expect to get product details, not a bigger image. That is why our FlyTabs Virtuemart Theme has the option to link product images to product details.

As a company, CorFun was using Wink to do presentation and training movies. Wink is an open source application that did a decent job, and rendered its output as swf files that played nicely in a browser. However, as soon as we needed audio for training or demo videos, Wink just stopped cutting it.

I first started working on Web projects for the Orthodox Christian Network (myocn.net) in late 2006. At the time, OCN had one program – Come Receive the Light. Come Receive the Light was primarily a traditional radio broadcast, airing in many key markets once a week. OCN’s Website was important, but had always been considered a secondary delivery channel compared to terrestrial radio.

Virtuemart is the best shopping cart solution around for Joomla CMS. Joomla, of course, just happens to be the best content management system around, so the combination of the two is a serious powerhouse. Joomla requires a template to operate. Virtuemart uses a theme, but since it runs inside Joomla, it works with the template also. That causes a lot of confusion for more novice users, so we would like to help clear that up. New online shop owners need to understand how they unique and look and feel of their sites will be generated.

The Great Commission wasn’t a suggestion. It was a commandment. We are to share the Orthodox Faith with the entire world. But how are we supposed to reach people? Stand on a soapbox on a street corner? Go door-to-door? Visit the sick, the needy, the elderly? Those are all good things that are worth doing. But did you ever think about using your Facebook account to spread Orthodoxy?

Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites are all the rage. People use them to find lost friends, connect with others with similar interests, and as an easy way to keep everyone updated with the latest news.

My parish is in the Diocese of the South, and does not have a bishop at present. When we do have a bishop, that bishop covers an area the size of Western Europe with over 70 different parishes. The fact is that a bishop presiding over the South could spend every Sunday away from home, and still not be able to visit all of his parishes in a given year.

With the economy in the tank, businesses need all the tourist dollars they can get. Which is why local police ruining family vacations with speeding tickets is a bad idea. Unfortunately, with towns and cities hurting for cash, the RADAR gun is getting more use than ever. New evidence proves that speed enforcement isn't about safety, but about making money for local governments. Not only is speeding not a serious cause of accidents, but a new study has shown a correlation between declining municipal revenues and increased speeding fines. Worse, as police focus on traffic enforement, other types of crimes tend to go up. Business owners need to get the facts to guard their businesses from the harm strict speed enforcement can cause.

In one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, the esteemed detective had deduced that the villain was an American. But, all the suspects were purporting to be British. How to figure out which one was lying?

Elementary, my Dear Watson! Holmes tossed the prime suspect a ball. He caught it with his left hand, at which point Holmes promptly arrested him.

Why, you might ask? Because the man was right-handed. A right-handed European man would catch a ball thrown to him with his right hand. A right-handed American, however, would wear his baseball glove on his left hand. That means a right-handed American would catch a ball with his left hand, which is the exact opposite of how the rest of the world works.

Globally, Orthodox Christianity is known to be highly conservative concerning what is frequently referred to as "traditional Christian morality." In Europe, for example, more progressive and liberal elements of society spare no effort in attacking the Church as a bastion of traditionalist repression, especially concerning homosexuality.

Ironically, however, in the United States an image seems to be growing of the Orthodox Church as more liberal towards sexual sins than, for example, the Evangelical denominations. Quite a few people, judging by chatter on the Internet, are getting the impression that Orthodoxy is similar to the Episcopal Church in respect to moral issues.

Obama's stimulus plan won't help the economy, and might actually sound the death knell of the dollar. After all, the whole thing is predicated on the idea that you can borrow and spend your way to prosperity. That is just plain nuts, of course. You don't borrow your way to wealth - you produce your way to wealth. Americans are tapped out and swimming in debt, so producing for the domestic market is a tough slog right now. Good thing there is a big world out there, and a good way to sell what you produce is to target it.

In the U.S., Orthodox Christians rarely get the opportunity to feel good about celebrities. There are quite a few people who claim to be Orthodox who work in movies, in politics, and in the arts. Unfortunately, almost all of these people are not what could be termed spiritual role models. Nominally Orthodox politicians get busted for corruption, Hollywood Hellenes live tabloid lives that shame everyone, and our artists cause no end of mischief. We are so used to this state of affairs, most of us don't even react anymore. Which is why when someone who is genuinely Orthodox, and famous, does something important we need to take notice.

Rod Dreher is an Orthodox Christian and columnist for the Dallas Morning News. He's also a contributor to the Orthodox Christian Network, where his Just Thinking podcast is one of the network's most popular shows. He was also the target of a critical article recently published on a prominent conservative blog site.

My first Christmas Eve in Poland, I was invited to a friend's house to celebrate. It was 1992, and though I had been teaching in Poland for six months, most of my time had been spent around other ex-pat Americans. This was my first real Polish holiday, and I had looked forward to it eagerly.

A Website exists for a reason. That seems axiomatic, but the fact is that many Website owners lose site of that fundamental fact. Before taking on any Web project, I always ask future Web entrepreneurs, "What is the purpose of your Website, and how do you plan to make money off it?"

Content Management Systems are growing in popularity as a framework for running Websites. A Content Management System (CMS) automates many of the repetitive tasks associated with running a Website. Using a script framework and a database, a CMS lets organizations sponsoring Websites focus on publishing content to the Web. A CMS framework also comes bundled with all kinds of capabilities such as interactivity (discussion forums, comments, blogging), membership, syndication (RSS feeds), podcasting, and a whole lot more.

Are you an Orthodox Christian with friends or relatives in or around Damascus, Syria? Do you belong to the Antiochian jurisdiction, and so have ties to Syria that way? If so, you might want to notify all your Syrian contacts that Damascus, ancient seat of civilization and the home of the Patriarch of Antioch along with thousands of Christians, is about to be destroyed by Israel.

My family members are Evangelicals of the Pentecostal variety. I was raised in that faith, but being Orthodox for almost 10 years has distanced me quite a bit from the world of megachurches and televangelists. Still, visiting home frequently means coming face-to-face with it, as my retired dad usually watches several hours of televangelism a day. He's good about keeping the TV off when my kids are awake, but after they are in bed, he often turns on programs he's recorded during the day.

We got herded into the room blindfolded. We knew that we had gone down some steps into a basement and that it was cool. Other than that, we weren't sure where we were or what was happening.

We heard chanting. Suddenly, the blindfolds were removed, and robes were hurriedly put on us. As we stood there blinking, we found ourselves in a candlelit room with various symbols on the wall. On the floor, was a great diamond around which we found ourselves arrayed. As we stood there, a ceremony began that would bind us to this brotherhood. The service was intoned by robed men reading from leather-bound service books.

Icons in Sound is a relatively new program on the Orthodox Christian Network. The host, Vlad Morosan, is an expert on Orthodox liturgical music. I feel like this is a show that practically every Orthodox Christian needs to listen to, and listen to every week.

Why? Because we don't go to church except on Sunday.

I'm often accused of being something of a Joomla Content Management System Evangelist. I'll admit it. I am a little passionate. But I think with good reason. This blog is actually a reprinting of a case study I did concerning Maryjean Zarick and her Paradise Music site. I wrote it up to highlight some of the great stuff Joomla can do for a small business person, and I decided to share it as a blog here to help spread the word.

In February 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. This capped off a process which had begun with NATO's airwar on Serbia from 24 March to 10 June 1999. That campaign killed an estimated 5,000 Orthodox Christian Serb soldiers, and wounded an estimated 10,000 more. This is in addition to the estimated 500 innocent Orthodox Christian civilians that were killed by bombs striking non-military targets. The direct damage of the bombing campaign has been estimated at $30 billion dollars in one of the poorest nations in Europe. Serbia is not expected to recover from the U.S.-led bombing campaign for another decade or more.

For optimizing Search Engine Placement and driving referral traffic, getting links to your business or ministry site is absolutely essential. Unfortunately, despite the critical need for this, many Webmasters don't even know how to check the links they currently have, much less how to get more.

My ninety-one-year-old grandmother was in horrible pain. As she lay in the hospital bed, dehydrated and unable to even take her own medicines, she repeatedly cried out to God, "Lord, help me!"

My father and I sat at her bedside watching her struggle. "She's praying for healing," I said to my father, "I don't think God is going to answer that prayer. I think he's already rendered His judgment on this, and she's praying the wrong prayer."

A short time later, she suddenly switched her prayer. She cried out, "Lord, take me on!" She prayed that prayer three times. Then she became very still, as if sleeping. Within five minutes, I noticed she wasn't breathing.

"I guess she finally prayed the prayer that God was willing to answer," I said to my father as we verified that she was gone.

MIT did a study of 500 International Companies looking to figure out the key ingredients to success in the global economy. The results of this study were summarized in a book by Suzanne Berger called How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make it in Today's Global Economy.

The book itself makes interesting reading, if you like this kind of literature, and I highly recommend it. For those that don't go in for that sort of book, let me summarize the key findings.

Modern businesses and ministries run off software. We need it to do everything from sending emails, to preparing presentations, to finding new members/customers online.

In this blog, I would like to take a moment to recommend some great Open Source Applications which can really make your business life easier, and which won't stretch your budget.

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?"

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.

In late 2007, Dr. Clark Carlton, author of the well-known five-volume Faith Series of books on Orthodoxy, published an Open Letter to Orthodox Christians on behalf of Ron Paul. In his letter, published on LewRockwell.com, Dr. Carlton lays out his case for why Orthodox Christians should support Republican Ron Paul for president.

Dr. Carlton believes that our unique experiment in self-governance is at a cross-roads, and that only rediscovering Constitutional principles as espoused by Ron Paul can save our Republic.

I got to do something really nice last week. As an Orthodox Christian and Web professional, I'm always thrilled whenever I get to help out new ministries get started. That is why being able to help the online presence of a new ministry dedicated to helping our missionary families was such an honor.

The Rise of Wicca!

The journalists look at this process and see a way to write sensational headlines that grab the readers' attention. Many conservative leaders look at this and immediately start denouncing the sorry state of affairs, while asking for our donations to help rectify it immediately. Theologians of all stripes launch into attacks on the foundations of the new mystery cults.

But, I'm a business analyst. I look at this situation and see a really good marketing opportunity for Orthodoxy.

If I say the phrase, Orthodox author to you, what name comes to mind? Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Perhaps a Theological writer like Bishop Kallistos Ware or Father Alexander Schmemann?

But, if you searched for the phrase Orthodox author using Google for the first few weeks of December 2007, you wouldn't find any of those famous authors at the top of the search results.

Instead, you would find Heather Zydek and Father Leon Castner .

Back in September 2007, a poster on the Website Orthodox Circle wrote an impassioned plea. He and his wife are adult converts to Orthodoxy. They have visited our church in the past, but are now attending a mission closer to their home. The gentleman wanted to know, in regards to growing the Orthodox Church, "How can we inform the masses about our church, so that it doesn't seem so strange to the protestants?"

I heard my wife screaming on the phone. I ran into the room, thinking something major was going wrong. Like a home invasion, or a fire or something.

Turns out, she was yelling at technical support because she couldn't get the Website our umbrella school uses to track grades and attendance to take her recent updates.

The old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words" may be a cliche but in the case of technical training - it's absolutely true.

Every Web designer has that moment of grace at least once. A moment when you look at the layout, the colors, the text, and the images - and the page just works. Everything is just perfect. I had that happen recently. I remember how ecstatic I was. This was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or at least so I thought.

A few years back I was attending a Greek Orthodox parish. At coffee hour one Sunday, I asked a recently Chrismated couple how their Thanksgiving had been the week before.

"It was good," the husband said, "But it was hard eating vegetarian when my family was having turkey."

I laughed, because I'd just spent Thanksgiving at the home of an Orthodox priest with a big, fat turkey in the deep fryer.

Having a first period class in college was bad enough. But, when the class was Russian History during the Middle Ages with an elderly professor nearing retirement, well that was downright torturous. Especially when the professor was a man known for his dry wit.

I remember sitting there one morning, bleary eyed, as he stood in front discussing the Great Schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches and its effects on Eastern Europe.

I could hear the frustration in her voice as we talked. The head of a non-profit, she was upset about her Website. It hadn't been updated in a year, and she desperately needed to get control of it. She had fundraising product to sell, supporters to keep updated, and prospective member information to distribute.

A few years back, I had the opportunity to deliver my standard presentation on Jihad to a Greek Orthodox Sunday school class. Towards the end of the presentation, I started fielding questions. A few of the ladies in the class were really interested in the role of the Middle East in fulfilling Biblical prophecy. I was taken aback by the questions. I knew the ladies were cradle Orthodox, but the tone and content of the questions betrayed both a knowledge of, and a belief in, the Dispensationalist view of the ‘End Times.'

Techies love acronyms. So much so, in fact, that we often sound like we're speaking a foreign language to normal humans. That's too bad, because a lot of times the acronyms obscure information about really, really useful tools.

As an Orthodox Parish Webmaster, 2006 marked the year that I wanted to take the parish's Web presence into the 21^st Century. First I did a Bulletin Board/Discussion Forum . Then I did a large-scale photo gallery. In the Fall of 2006, the next stop for the Web presence of the Orthodox Church of St. Stephen the Protomartyr was to go dynamic.

My wife and I were filling out the paperwork to join a homeschooling umbrella group when we hit a huge snag. The umbrella school we planned to use is Christian-based, but it's run by very, very Protestant people. They had a statement of faith which all potential members had to sign. The statement of faith was, essentially, a Protestant catechism which included such fundamental Protestant beliefs as justification by faith alone and the Bible as the only rule of faith.

Looking over the statement, I immediately picked out nine heresies I could actually name. That was out of only eight clauses in the whole document. Their version of fundamental, commonly accepted Christian truths was like a mini-catalog of errors rejected by the Orthodox Church.

I speak frequently at civic clubs and political organizations on the subject of Christians in the Middle East. My undergrad background was heavy on Balkans studies, and so I spent a lot of time studying the life of Christians under Muslim rule. Little did I realize, of course, when I was taking classes like Ottoman History and Arab Politics back in the early 90's, that someday the topics of Jihad and Dhimmitude would be paramount concerns in the 21^st Century.

Images are important. Orthodox Christians know that better than any other Christian community, which is why we struggle to keep our churches adorned appropriately. Many of our icons, of course, depict scenes from the life of the Church. Great events in the Christian past are rendered in gold leaf and hung for all to see and venerate. We understand how important it is to visually chronicle our past as a community, and to honor that past.

"Haven't you written anything about what you actually do for living?"

That question floored me. It shouldn't have, but it did.

I mean, I was in Google.

I took over my first parish Website in 2000, when I was still a catechumen. Back then I was working primarily in the mainframe space, and the Web was both new and somewhat scary. I got an extra copy of Frontpage 2000 at the office, and started putting icons and gold coloring on pages of my own for Holy Trinity in Maitland, Florida.

God could have chosen to have His son born in a palace. He could have been born to wealth and privilege, never needing to struggle or work hard to put food on the table.

But that wasn't the plan He pursued. Rather, Jesus was born to a working family. He grew up and pursued a trade. He labored and earned His keep by the sweat of His brow. So did his disciples and apostles.

And your next one probably will too.

I know. You're not in technology. You build things, or you are in a services industry.

Technology projects? Who cares about those?

You should, because technology doesn't exist for its own sake. Technology is a tool, and businesses of all sizes have to leverage technology to get work done that can't be done any other way.