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Archive for the Ancient Faith category
Worship & You: Unit 8
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2010 at 10:52 AM by Jason Barker
The study guide and discussion guide from Unit 8 of the Worship & You study are now available.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Miscellaneous, Online Resources, Youth Department
Worship & You Unit 7
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 11:23 AM by Jason Barker
The study guide and discussion guide for Unit 7 of the Worship & You study are now available.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Miscellaneous, Online Resources
Worship & You: Unit 6
Posted on Friday, March 05, 2010 at 3:23 PM by Jason Barker
The study guide and discussion guide for Unit 6 of the Worship & You study are now available.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Miscellaneous, Online Resources
Worship & You: Unit 5
Posted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 10:53 AM by Jason Barker
The study guide and discussion guide for Unit 5 of the Worship & You study are now available.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Miscellaneous, Online Resources
Worship & You: Unit 3
Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010 at 12:04 PM by Jason Barker
The study guide and discussion guide for Unit 3 of the Worship & You study are now available.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Online Resources, Youth Department
Worship & You: Unit 2
Posted on Friday, February 05, 2010 at 4:46 PM by Jason Barker
The teen study guide and discussion guide for Unit 2 of the Worship & You study are now available.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Online Resources, Youth Department
Worship & You Now Live!
Posted on Monday, February 01, 2010 at 12:34 PM by Jason Barker
Worship & You, my new multimedia study with Ancient Faith Radio, is now live! The study examines how you can carry the transforming power of Orthodox worship into daily life.
The study offers free downloadable study guides, discussion guides, and podcasts in two versions: one for teens, and another for adults.
Unit 1 is currently available; new units will be added weekly until the study concludes.
The Department of Youth Ministry is also partnering in the project to create the teen version of the study.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Miscellaneous, Online Resources, Orthodox News, Youth Department
Worship & You Starts in One Week!
Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 12:26 PM by Jason Barker
Worship & You, the new multimedia study on carrying the transforming power of Orthodox worship into daily life, begins February 1st!
Worship & You will feature free downloadable study guides, discussion guides, and podcast in two versions: one for adults, and another for teens.
Worship & You is a production of Orthodox Resource, Ancient Faith Radio and the Department of Youth Ministry - Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Miscellaneous, Online Resources
Worship & You
Posted on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 9:47 AM by Jason Barker
Starting February 1, 2010
WORSHIP & YOU: Carrying the Transforming Power of Orthodox Worship into Daily Life
Do you want to deepen your worship of God, and take the transforming power of that experience with you into your daily life? If so, you’ll want to participate in WORSHIP & YOU, the exciting new multimedia study for Orthodox Christian adults and teens from Jason Barker (host of the re/CALL podcast) and Ancient Faith Radio.
WORSHIP & YOU will focus on the main services of the Orthodox Church and personal prayer, looking at the meaning of what we say and do during this worship and how we can take this with us into our daily lives. Each week you can download a study guide discussing how you can grow in your worship of God, as well as a discussion guide with questions to help you better understand the material. These free resources will be available in two versions: one for adults, and another for teens.
You can also download the related episode of either the Worship & You (for adults) or re/CALL (for teens) podcast to listen to the study when you’re on-the-go.
Get ready: WORSHIP & YOU begins FEBRUARY 1, 2010!
Posted in Ancient Faith, Jason Barker, Online Resources, Orthodox News
AFR iPhone App
Posted on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 8:25 PM by Jason Barker
Ancient Faith Radio has announced a new AFR app for the iPhone / iPod Touch that allows you to listen to their two stations:
Ancient Faith Radio is happy to announce a native iPhone App, developed by Axios Digital Solutions, which allows you to easily play our two radio stations at home or on the go. Just visit the App store in iTunes or on your iPhone and search for “Ancient Faith” to download.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Online Resources
New Podcast on American Orthodox History
Posted on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 at 1:14 PM by Jason Barker
There are enough new podcasts launching on a regular basis that I no longer announce each one, but Ancient Faith Radio has launched a new podcast that sounds particularly interesting: American Orthodox History, focusing on the history of the Church in North America.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Orthodox News
OCN on the iPhone
Posted on Friday, February 20, 2009 at 10:15 AM by Jason Barker
You can now listen to the Orthodox Christian Network's Internet radio stations, The Ark and The Rudder, on the iPhone / iPod Touch without purchasing WunderRadio (as I talked about in an earlier post).
The MP3 streams of these stations can be accessed by using the following URLs:
The Ark: http://63.247.193.10:8092/listen.pls
The Rudder: http://63.247.193.10:8102/listen.pls
I'm not sure what process the OCN has in mind for playing these streams on the iPhone / iPod (since they won't open in Safari), but I've gotten them to play by entering the URLs into my favorites in the free FStream app (which is the iPhone version of the same free app I use on my iMac).
ADDED: I should also note that I use FStream to listen to Ancient Faith's music stream (I seldom listen to the talk stream, since I already subscribe to quite a few podcasts). Simply add the following URLs to your favorites:
Ancient Faith Music: http://ancientfaith.com/streams/music128k.pls
Ancient Faith Talk: http://ancientfaith.com/streams/talk64k.pls
Edited on: Friday, February 20, 2009 10:31 AMPosted in Ancient Faith, OCN, Online Resources
Podcasting Guide
Posted on Monday, December 29, 2008 at 11:31 AM by Jason Barker
Alex Lindsay - one of the regulars on MacBreak Weekly (one of my favorite non-Orthodox podcasts) - has written a solid introduction to producing your own podcast. I largely agree with what he says (as can be seen in a mini-series of posts I wrote on the GET WISDOM site), but I should also point out that quite a few podcasts - including most of Ancient Faith's - are created using USB microphones.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Miscellaneous
Coffee Cup Commentaries
Posted on Thursday, October 09, 2008 at 10:16 PM by Jason Barker
Beginning Monday, October 20th, Ancient Faith Radio will begin offering the Coffee Cup Commentaries, a daily Bible study podcast with Fr. Lawrence Farley. Fr. Lawrence, author of The Orthodox Bible Study Companion series by Conciliar Press, will host the daily program examining the epistles of the Holy Apostle Paul.
Click here to listen to a promo for the podcast.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Online Resources
Ancient Faith Matching Gift Total Met
Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 5:11 PM by Jason Barker
John Maddex writes that Ancient Faith Radio has met the goal of $10,000 for their May matching gift program:
At the beginning of May we told you about a generous $10,000 gift which came in just prior to Great Lent. The donating group had asked that these funds be put aside until our listeners joined together to match them dollar for dollar. Well, we are very happy to report that the goal was met in just 3 weeks! Thanks be to God! And a huge thanks to all of you who participated! If you intended to give but did not get a chance to do so, we still need you - especially if you are able to commit to a new monthly donation. Please see our DONATIONS page for more information.
Posted in Ancient Faith
AFR Matching Gift Program
Posted on Thursday, May 01, 2008 at 8:39 AM by Jason Barker
Ancient Faith Radio has announced that they have a matching gift program:
As we continue into Spring, we would like to ask for your help. As the result of a generous $10,000 gift which came in just prior to Great Lent, we have a tremendous matching opportunity. The donating group has asked that these funds be put aside until our listeners join together to match them dollar for dollar. Your gift right now will help release these needed funds into our available operating account. We are trying to get this matched by the end of May so please do what you can. Let's work together to reach this $10,000 goal this month! To do your part, please visit our DONATIONS page.
Posted in Ancient Faith
Tools for Collecting Orthodox Quotes
Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 at 2:41 PM by Jason Barker
The work I do requires a fair amount of organization - I have numerous different projects on which I'm working at any given time for different organizations, departments and/or ministries. I've therefore developed reasonable (for me) systems of organizing my time, my different projects, the resources for the different projects, and resources (such as Lingo scripts for Director) that I share between projects.
An area in which I tend to fail dismally, however, is in organizing my notes - and particularly quotations - that I use in articles and other documents I write. For some inexplicable reason, when writing I tend to simply have teetering piles of books stuffed with bookmarks on my desk - and a large number of websites bookmarked in my browser - but I have seldom gotten around to actually putting quotes and citations in some type of database or filing system. Thus, when I need a quote or reference that I used in a previous publication, I need to remember the specific publication, find it, and then read it to find the needed information (and too often I find that I misremembered the publication, forcing me to go through several works until I find the information).
My primary New Year's resolution for this year was therefore to turn around this abominable practice and develop a recording system that will enable me to easily find quotations on a topic. I was fortunate to use a type of application that works well with the way my mind organizations information; you might also find it to be helpful.
TREE-STYLE EDITORS
The application to which I'm referring is a tree-style text editor (you can also find them called such things as tree-view information organizers, tree-view PIMs, etc.). When working on the application for the Be Transformed study of Romans, I needed some way of tracking the location of objects on screens, the specific screens on which specific articles and indices appeared, and the location of individual objects (such as specific scripts) from within the cast of several thousand objects that are used in the application.
The free tree-style editor KeyNote (for Windows) served my needs very well: I created nodes for such things as the templates for the different types of screens, and then child nodes for each individual type of screen. Then, when I needed to find the location of an object on a screen, I could simply open the node for templates, and then look at the child node on which I had listed the object locations within that template. I created similar sets of parent/child nodes for articles and for cast members.
If I still used Windows as my primary OS I would still be using KeyNote. I eventually switched to a Mac, however, and I wanted something that would run on my Mac without necessitating the time and resource drain of continually running Windows in Parallels simply so that I could take notes. I eventually settled on Jreepad, a multi-platform application (it requires Java). Jreepad lacks many of KeyNote's features - particularly the ability to work with rich text (Jreepad uses only plain text) - but it saves files in the same format as the commercial application Treepad (which is a Windows app, but is supposedly coming to the Mac this year), and I like the fact that it allows me and others to use the files on both Windows and OS X.
Many readers may prefer Jreepad because, while it's more limited than KeyNote, it is also significantly easier to use than KeyNote: there are only eight simple commands, each of which has its own button in the application's toolbar.
SAVING AND ORGANIZING ORTHODOX QUOTES
I'll use Jreepad - which both PC and Mac users can use - as an example of how you can collect and organize quotations from Church Fathers and modern Orthodox writers. The image below displays the key elements I'll be discussing.
You'll start in the organizational tree by naming the main topic to be covered in this file: in my Jreepad file I simply named this topic "Patristic Quotes" (even though I also include modern quotations). Every topic that you will add to this collection will be added by clicking the "Add Below" button.
After creating a node for an individual topic (you can see my continually-growing list of topics in the left sidebar of the above image), you will then add a child to that topic. I organize the "children" of my topics in one of two ways: by subtopic, or by author. A huge topic - like Christ - will have a number of subtopics; a smaller topic - like Annunciation - will probably not have subtopics, and thus the first level of children will be the names of authors of various quotes. Further levels of children can be created as necessary.
To see an example of this, in the above graphic look at the node for "Annunciation" (which, at the time I am writing this, we will celebrate tomorrow). At this time I only have a quotation from St. Romanos the Melodist about the Annunciation; there is therefore only one child for Annunciation node. I also only have one quote from St. Romanos, and thus there is only one child of his node; if I had two hymns from him, then there would be two children of the "St. Romanos the Melodist" node.
If there is a subtopic that becomes so big that it needs to be made into its own topic, I can simply use the "Out" button to move the node further to the left (which also changes its level in the organizational hierarchy from a "child" node to a "parent" node). Conversely, when I create a topic that I later decide should instead be a subtopic of another topic, then I can use the "Up" button to move the lesser topic's node directly beneath the node for the greater topic, and then use the "In" button to move the lesser topic to the right (and thereby change it into a "child" of the greater topic).
This is the basic process I use for organizing and saving Orthodox quotations. The specific application commands will be different if you use KeyNote instead of Jreepad (or any other similar program), but the basic organizational strategy you use will be similar.
SOURCES FOR ORTHODOX QUOTES
There are, of course, many excellent translations of patristic works and modern works from St. Vladimir's Seminary Press and others that you can obtain from such sources as Light & Life, Conciliar Press and Eighth Day Books. There are also good modern Orthodox periodicals, like Conciliar Press' AGAIN magazine and The Handmaiden.
There are also websites with free translations of patristic works. In addition to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library's public domain collection of The Early Church Fathers, Matthew Steenberg's Monachos site has quite a few translations and articles.
I also recommend Fr. Stephen Freeman's Glory to God for All Things blog which, in addition to containing Fr. Stephen's valuable thoughts, also frequently contains quotations from ancient and modern Orthodox writers. Fr. Stephen also hosts the Glory to God podcast for Ancient Faith Radio, and frequently appears on Theologically Thinking on the Orthodox Christian Network.
Posted in Ancient Faith, Miscellaneous, OCN
Fr. Thomas Hopko on Bible Reading
Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 at 10:12 AM by Jason Barker
In the current episode of his podcast, Speaking the Truth in Love, Fr. Thomas Hopko encourages Orthodox Christians to read the Bible during Great Lent.
Posted in Ancient Faith
My New Podcast - re/CALL
Posted on Friday, March 21, 2008 at 6:04 PM by Jason Barker
My new podcast, re/CALL, has launched on Ancient Faith Radio! The podcast - like my other work for the Department of Youth Ministry - is directed to Orthodox Christian teens, focusing on the ways in which your relationship with God and His Church can permeate every aspect of your life.
The first episode focuses on why we should pray, and looks at ways to overcome some of the most common reasons for not praying.
Along with each episode I'll also create a free re/CALL This! graphic, which emphasizes a key point from the episode. The first re/CALL This! graphic presents a quote from St. John the Solitary about praying with gratitude.
Posted in Ancient Faith, re/CALL
re/CALL This! 1 Uploaded
Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 11:12 AM by Jason Barker
I've uploaded the first edition of re/CALL This!, a free graphic that will accompany each episode of my new re/CALL podcast. Each re/CALL This! graphic will highlight a key point from that week's episode of the podcast; this first edition features a quotation from St. John the Solitary about ways in which to pray with gratitude.
In addition to using re/CALL This! as a way of remembering key points from the podcast, you can also send copies of the graphic for your friends to let them know about this Orthodox Christian podcast for teens.
The re/CALL podcast itself will launch on Ancient Faith Radio this Saturday, March 22, 2008.
For new visitors, you might also be interested in Get Wisdom, my Bible study podcast for teens that is streamed by the Orthodox Christian Network.
Posted in Ancient Faith, re/CALL
New Podcast Coming 3/22
Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 7:32 PM by Jason Barker
My new podcast, re/CALL (Responding to God's Call in Your Life), will launch on March 22nd. re/CALL is a podcast for Orthodox Christian teens and young adults that focuses on how your relationship with God and His Church can permeate every aspect of your life: dealing with family, friends, school, work, your spiritual life, and everything in-between!
To learn more, visit the re/CALL website at www.orthodoxyouth.org/recall.
The program is a partnership between the Department of Youth Ministry and Ancient Faith Radio.
Posted in Ancient Faith, re/CALL, Youth Department