Where do our hymns come from? Who wrote them? This time of year (Advent/Christmas season) we rejoice in singing the Nativity kontakion Today the Virgin gives birth... We owe this beautiful hymnography to the great faith of St. Romanos. Sweet Song - A Story of St. Romanos the Melodist is a wonderfuly written story for children about how St Romanos had his prayers answered by being given the gift of writing hymns for the Orthodox faithful. The story introduces St Romanos as a server in the church around Christmas time. He rejoices at the beauty of the church and is diligent in his tasks in preparing the temple for the feast. His one consternation is that he lacks the confidence and musical abilities to chant with his fellow readers. For this, they bully and taunt him. This makes St Romanos pray ever more fervently for the ability to praise God with beautiful words and music. His prayers are answered on Christmas Eve when the Theotokos appears to him in a dream and feeds him a scroll. He amazes all on Christmas morning when the inspiring words of the Nativity kontakion poured from his heart. The story ends with his fellow readers asking him for forgiveness and joining together in song.
I enjoyed the extra information about his life and works that are included at the end of book.
Sweet Song is wonderful book to add to your collection and a great gift for the holiday season!

It was startlingly intimate. Like sitting in a solitary place, with a familiar book, and suddenly a stranger has approached and spoken softly, without preamble, “And this is how it is with me, with this,” pointing to the text in question, “Here is what my soul felt.”

I’ve spent four years with the Philokalia, my battered copy of the first volume has been the book I packed everywhere, from the beach to a hiking trail. It is a collection, an ancient one ranging from 300-1400 A.D. of texts written by spiritual masters, by saints and recluses, monks and priests. Philokalia is best translated as “the love of the beautiful”, and a more apt name I cannot imagine. In an age of delusion, illusion, artifice, and dissipation, I find nothing as beautiful as truth; it is precise medicine, and when delivered by ones whose hearts have been conquered by Love, healing follows.

I was used to reading the words alone. Indeed, I didn’t know anyone else personally who was also meditating on it, so my journey was a rather solitary affair. When I saw that this book by Angela Doll Carlson was available I was overjoyed; a fellow pilgrim! How did it strike her? What thoughts had it stirred within her?

“Be vigilant in prayer and avoid all rancor. Let the teachings of the Holy Spirit be always with you, and use the virtues as your hands to knock at the door of Scripture.”

-Evagrios the Solitary

So I heard her voice, her unpretentious voice, and again, I was surprised; here was no small talk, no wide gulf of academic apologetics to separate writer from reader; here she was, vulnerable, open.

“When my kids would complain about getting up for school, I would say, ‘I know it’s hard. Do it anyway.’ On the mornings when it is most difficult to get up, I remind myself of this blurry-eyed advice. Exercising control, leaning into prayer, knocking on the doors of Scripture become a tow rope to pull me from being left to my own devices. The evidence of our need is clear when the struggle pushes in on us before we’re even out of bed.” -The Wilderness Journal, Day 38

Yes.

Reading this work has been something of a book club with a new friend. I nod empathetically, I see the texts in a new light by how they’ve illuminated her. In a strange way, I can know Evagrios the Solitary a bit better because of how he is understood by Carlson. As C.S. Lewis said in The Four Loves, on his chapter on Friendship: “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”

The stranger that spoke so intimately gradually became a familiar voice and a regular companion as I read. We were joined intermittently by guides who introduced the authors of the texts, giving flesh and history and place to the words which however ancient and removed from our times as they may be, have the same direct relevance to our lives, to our souls. One does not have to be a monk in the desert to apply the spiritual teachings; the Enemy of our souls has not changed over the millennia, and he afflicts both the ascetic and the waitress, the bishop and the accountant.

I am certainly in favor of reading primary sources, but reading in community, even if one can only truly be a passive observer of how a text affects another, is a gift. Somehow it seems that there are few book clubs that pop up ready to study ancient teachings of recluses and monks, so it is a blessing to have another voice, a fellow pilgrim’s thoughts weighing in on these marvelous texts.

The Psalms of the Holy King and Prophet David are poems and songs that speak to the frailty of human life in all of its joys, sorrows, successes and failures. Songs of Praise: A Psalter Devotional for Orthodox Women by Sylvia Leontaritis uses the Psalter, divided into 20 Kathismata, to guide the reader through thoughtful prayer and reflection.

The cover invites you in with its calming florals and pastels. Already your soul breathes in with anticipation of meeting Him Who inspired the words. The carefully chosen subtle floral designs continue inside the book. You almost can smell their sweet scent. Care and consideration of the reader is found in each and every page, down to the flourishes beside the page numbers.

In each Kathisma, margins are wide allowing room to jot a prayer, a name or a thought along side of a Psalm’s verse, which is helpfully numbered. At the end of each Kathisma, Mrs. Leontaritis includes a heartfelt devotion to inspire reflection, followed by four blank pages for the reader to dialogue with the Psalms or essay in any way the Lord leads.

Some of the reflections are hard hitting, such as “The Pharisee in Me,” and “Unsocial Media.” In “My Beautiful Mess” the issues of multi-tasking, distractions and reprioritizing are discussed. Contemporary issues are brought to the forefront and addressed with gentleness and firmness.

Since being received into the Holy Orthodox Church 14 years ago, I have longed for a devotional written specifically with women in mind. Songs of Praise does not disappoint. Everything about this book is wonderful. Mrs. Leontaritis opens her heart, invites you in for a cup of tea and talks with you and God. Won’t you join her (and me)?

NB: Ancient Faith Publishing gifted me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Shepherding Sam by Melinda Johnson

Full disclosure: I love corgi's! I once owned a sweet corgi many years ago and have always wanted to own another one. They are wonderful dogs and really great with families.
A lovely story about a dog and a boy and a monastery. Sam is an active boy that struggles with church and spending time at the monastery. Saucer is a dog who only wants to herd- sheep, nuns, animals, maybe even Sam.

I loved this book! I loved that the main character reminded me of my own children- not always super excited to go to church, somewhat distracted by everything that is going on around them. I love that this story shows the struggle that Sam goes through to be at the monastery. Sometimes our church stories skip over that struggle. To have a character experiencing apprehension about visiting the monastery and figuring out his place is refreshing especially for those readers who feel the same way as Sam.

The other great thing about this book is it includes dragons, animals, swords, and a dog and boy who are trying to figure out their own purpose in all of this.

This book would be a great read aloud with younger children and older children can easily read it on their own. I am very excited that this is now the first book in a series and look forward to reading book two- The Barn and the Book by the same author.

I was gifted a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Wilderness Journal divides the year into eight authors of the Philokalia, taking the most powerful snippets and offering a bit of contemplation. Each day will take 5-10 minutes to read through but much longer to mentally and spiritually digest. The tone fits the title—this is someone’s journal. The exposition is neither theologically deep nor overly practical. Other books of this type can become too academic when expounding upon the text to the point that it only makes the original passage more confusing. Other times, books like these can be so practical to the point that only half the book can apply to my life. The Wilderness Journal is the author’s initial impression after reading that portion of the Philokalia. More than offering any explanation or exposition, she offers questions or examples to show how to work through such daunting and ancient texts in a modern layman’s context.

St. Romanos' story is beautiful and I love how the author tells his story. The illustrations are beautiful and convey a youthful St. Romanos, which children can relate to. The story about the dream with the Theotokos is captivating. I didnt know this about him until I read this book! My kids really enjoyed this part of the story. it is truly amazing that our faith has preserved his hymns for so long. This book is perfect to read during the Christmas season because he wrote the Nativity Kontakion and the kids will sing it at church. It helps them connect to St. Romanos when they hear his words still used today.

The Book and the Barn is the kind of book that expresses a great deal of feeling with simple language. The story begins, and you feel as if a friend were gently guiding you down the path of the monastery where the gentle but anxious Sister Anna lives down to the farm to meet their goats. The story predominantly revolves around Grace, an enthusiastic young girl; Sam, an energetic young boy who’s best friend is the monastery dog, Saucer; and Sister Anna, a Sunday school teacher and nun.
This book tells the story by sharing with you specific events that are crisp and present. While the book does have a loose plot, these snapshots predominantly deal with the internal world of its characters. Sister Anna and Sam struggle with faith while Grace struggles with finding her place in the world.
I loved seeing the internal discomfort of all the characters as they encountered their challenges. As a preschool teacher in a Christian school, I often notice how Christian literature often fails to meet the challenge of explaining struggle of faith in a meaningful way. Too often stories gloss over the moments of weakness or doubt that people face. I was stunned to read the way that Johnson writes about these uncomfortable moments in a way that is both child-appropriate and compassionate.
If you are looking for a story to read to your children this holiday season, pick up the Barn and the Book. If you are looking for a conversation-starter about faith with your whole family, read this aloud. If you are looking a gentle story about kindness, curl up with this book, as I did with a cup of tea.

Each day the Church remembers a long list of saints. We may wonder why each day has so many otherwise forgotten names attached to the Church calendar. These are the names of some of those who gave their all for Christ. A Daily Calendar of Saints, by Lawrence R. Farley is a new publication by Ancient Faith Publishing that provides an introduction to the saints of the ages for the modern reader.

As an ardent fan of Jane Austen’s fiction I compare A Daily Calendar of Saints to “visiting the upper rooms.” This book provides us with an introduction to those whom we will love. We are not meeting the social elite we are meeting those for whom love of Christ Jesus is foremost. There are no bores or self-absorbed scoundrels here. We don’t learn all that much about most of these people, but we do meet remarkable heroes who actually deserve the title.

A wide variety of martyrs and saints from every age and geographical area are included. The brief account of lives lived fully for Christ is the beginning of our knowledge of and admiration for the “great cloud of wittiness” that St. Paul reminded us are encouraging us. The professed purpose of the book is to enable us to cultivate the “friendship of the saints who are now in patria, in our heavenly homeland.”

This book is broken down as a calendar with a short paragraph or two for each day. We are briefly introduced to the key features of each saint’s life. We may not know them—yet—but they are some of the friends who are awaiting us with God. If our hope is heaven, then these are some of those with whom we hope to share our future.

The lives of these great men, women and children will surprise and inspire you. Hopefully you will want to learn more about some of these heroes of the faith. Find out more about their lives. Particularly be inspired to check out the books that they wrote. Reading their lives and letters, sermons and musings can profoundly influence us. Most of what the ancient fathers of the Church wrote is available free or at very low cost in digital format. That can be a good place to start. Once you find a saint who really engages you, buy a book or request one from your local library. Reading the words that have moved nations and changed lives for centuries is a powerful experience. I would also urge you to be on the look out for saints of more recent times. You may discover the writings of one who can speak God’s word directly into your heart and move you in ways you could not previously imagine.

The wonderful thing about this book is that every reader will be intrigued by the lives of different saints. By offering us an introduction to each of these people we have the chance to become acquainted with the lives of those who are most worthy of our attention. As you go through the year let yourself discover astounding people from every time and place. Adding this book to your daily reading is an amazingly simple way of meeting incredible men and women. Rather than viewing the long list of names attached to each day as challenge, recognize in them a glorious opportunity for you to become aquatinted with some of the most astounding people who have ever lived. These are those who can uplift and inspire us.

I am grateful to have received a copy of this book from the publisher for review.

I have had the privilege of reading through Fr. Lawrence Farley’s “A Daily Calendar of Saints over the past month. It is a collection of short, daily readings that highlight the lives & experiences of the Saints honored every day of the Eastern Orthodox liturgical year. I had been hunting for a book like this for some time & am glad that my search lead me here.
Fr. Lawrence has put together a lovely tribute to our beloved Saints while avoiding tedium & the haze of too much information. He gets to the heart of each account, shares beautiful little details, gives attention to male, female, well & lesser known Saints alike & gets to the “meat” of their incredible examples.
As a homeschooling family, we practice a morning routine dedicated to the exploration of our faith. A Daily Calendar of Saints has become a welcome addition to this ritual. Gone are the days of scouring the internet for stories of Saints & cobbling together a succinct summary for my little ones. With this daily reader at our fingertips, my children & I are delving into bite-sized stories of faith that spark further conversation in our home. Simplicity, practicality & beauty in one title. I am so grateful to have added this book to our home collection & anticipate its presence in our day-to-day lives for the foreseeable future. I highly recommend this title to all Orthodox individuals & families for their own “Little Church.”

I was gifted a copy of this book by Ancient Faith Publishing in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thanks.

Great book for kids just beginning chapter books! Relatable characters and engaging storyline, with an Orthodox setting.

I especially appreciate books that can be enjoyed by my 3 year old when I read aloud, but are also enjoyable to adults-- this one fit the bill. Orthodox setting combined with relatable characters (adult and children characters alike!) and a storyline that I think most kids will relate to.

I read these two books aloud to my three children ages 3, 6, and 9 and they all enjoyed them immensely. Shepherding Sam is a great beginning to the series, introducing us to the characters and most importantly to Saucer, the corgi! The second book, The Barn and the Book is even better, with a number of characters that adults and children, boys and girls can identify with. I enjoyed it as much as my kids did - perhaps even more. Without giving away too much of the story, I kind of choked up at the end ... I cannot wait for the next book in this series. This makes a fantastic gift; it is appropriate for all children and for independent reading, a child ages 8 and up.

This set of books is a relatable, engaging story, appropriate to read aloud to pre-readers, or would be perfect for children starting on chapter books.

As the principal of our school, I was very excited to have the opportunity by Ancient Faith Publishing to read and review this book Every morning, as a school, we gather for morning prayers. I have been looking for a way to incorporate short readings of the saint of the day into our morning prayers and kept coming across either very lengthy readings of saints lives or the readings incorporated language that is way over the heads of our youngest children (our Montessori preschool begins at age three). This book is the perfect balance of length and difficulty for even our youngest students. In fact, I may have our 5th graders eventually read the life of the saint to the children during our morning prayer time. As we use this book everyday, my prayer is that over the years, the children will remember these lives of the saints (not just the well known saints, but even the lesser known saints).
I highly recommend this book for families with children at all age levels. It is easy to read and comprehend. Most of the daily lives of the saints are a short paragraph while the more well know saints are a bit longer.
I was gifted a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

One thing I have found truly beautiful about Orthodoxy since converting a couple of decades ago is the Church’s love for her saints — those holy people who show us what theosis looks like in real human lives across time and space. When we learn their stories, and see their faces, and ask their intercessions, the saints become friends and companions for the journey. Getting to know them is the work of a lifetime, and good introductions to them are a tremendous help. That is why I was pleased to receive a review copy of A Daily Calendar of Saints (which I will refer to as ADCOS from here out), by Father Lawrence Farley, a solid collection of short (sometimes astonishingly brief) lives of saints arranged January through December, ordered by calendar date of observance, with a section in the back of the book with additional (mostly weekly) readings for the period of Pre-Lent through Pentecost. Most days have one or two entries, but I came across at least a few with three. The book seems to follow the Slavic calendar date conventions, so, for instance, St. Katherine of Alexandria is found on November 24th, rather than on the 25th.
It would take a full year to use the book as it seems to be intended, as a daily encounter with a few special saints, but I think it’s possible to speak to its utility as an everyday read just looking at it cover to cover and using it daily for a short time. The readings are concise and thoroughly “doable.” If you would like to have a single volume that introduces you to one or more saints each day, and ranges from about a quarter of a page to a perhaps a full page of daily reading, ADCOS is an excellent addition to your library. One feature that also allows this to be a good occasional reference resource is the printing of the month of the year on the edge of each page. The months there make it considerably easier to flip to a specific date.
To better understand the editorial choices and scope, I decided to compare the first half of the month of November in ADCOS to the second volume (November, December) of the Synaxarion by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra. ADCOS and the Synaxarion had the same first entry for the day, and if ADCOS included a second or third entry, they seem to have been selected from some of the better known remaining saints of the day. The articles were significantly shorter in ADCOS than in the Synaxarion, and the language Fr. Lawrence uses is accessible and unassuming. The editing choices made in ADCOS mean that even some well-known and well-beloved Saints are excluded, such as St. Kassiani, and that the saint’s lives which are included are told in the sparest detail, but these same choices allow the book to remain lean and portable and to contain saints for the entire year in just one modest volume.
This book will not replace a more exhaustive collection of lives like the Synaxarion, or the Prologue from Ohrid by St. Nikolai Velimirovich, but for someone without the budget or the stamina for the larger collections, or who is just looking for something more concise, this is a good value and a helpful daily tool or occasional reference. One pleasant surprise was found on November 8, where the second entry is the story of Matushka Olga of Alaska, who has yet to be glorified as of my writing, but is much loved—especially in the US and Canada.
This book would make a lovely gift for a godfamily or friends, especially those longing to add reading of hagiography to their daily routine, or those whose knowledge of the saints is just beginning to blossom.
As someone with more than a few hagiographical books on my shelves, one thing I wish had been included in this volume is an index of the saints by name, since, quite frankly, sometimes I want to find a saint by name when I do not recall the commemoration date. One can always find a date online, of course, but when I pick up a book, I’d like to stay there, and indexing would help with that! This omission, if it can even be claimed to be one, given the purpose of the book, is a rather minor flaw in a volume that does what it sets out to do in a rather elegant and restrained way, that is: “to help us cultivate the friendship of the saints…”

This book was recommended to me by Caleb Shoemaker, a mutual friend of myself and Dr. Roccas, who is also an author published by Ancient Faith (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H0FRCFS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).

Time and Despondency was, for me, an experience of great relief and renewed hope. Being my first encounter with a piece of literature focused on the topic of acedia, I witnessed the articulation of something that has, in my experience, always been vague, negative emotions. I lacked the vocabulary do describe how I felt, and I was completely ignorant of the existence of other people who shared my experiences. Acedia is not an unknown issue in Eastern Christianity, but it most certainly is in the Protestant Evangelical world that my wife and I left just months ago.

Dr. Roccas eloquently defines the particularities of despondency, making many references to great theologians and fathers of the Church, Evagrius and Staniloae among them. In the final part of the book, she administers some practical wisdom as an antidote to despondency.

It is my prayer that I, and anyone else that suffers from despondency, can use the wisdom found in this wonderful and easy to read book to journey back to the present moment and into the love of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Most Holy and Life-giving Spirit.

Well written with lessons applicable not just to kids but to anyone we come in contact with.

If you grew up Christian in protestant America, this will answer all your questions that have bugged you about the faith since childhood. It makes Christianity make sense.

The Barn & the Book by Melinda Johnson is the sequel to Shepherding Sam. It is not necessary to read Shepherding Sam first but it does give you some background on the characters. As I was reading this to the kids, I got to the part where Sister Anna goes to her favorite spot in the prayer garden and she starts to pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” and my husband turned and looked at me in what seemed to be confusion. I stopped reading, laughed, and said, “Yes, dear, this is an Orthodox children’s book.” It was cute. We enjoyed the story line very much, especially the story that was included in the Monastery’s birthday book. My 11 year old son says there is not enough action in the book but he loves when Gerontissa startles Sister Anna. My 9 year old said she loved the whole book and that she can’t pick just one favorite. My 7 year old said all the parts with Saucer (the dog) being playful. They all agreed that they enjoyed this book and recommend it to read, especially as a family. Thank you Melinda for such a cute book about friendship, testing God, taking time to learn and understand and notice. The Barn & the Book is 11 chapters long (12 if you count the epilogue), we read it in about 2 - 3 hours. We received a free copy of this book in return for an honest review.