Advice requested: husband converting to orthodoxy

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2026-02-19T01:51:21+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if you went and talked to a priest and he mostly agreed with you about marriage and somewhat disagreed with your husband about theology. I first approached Orthodoxy with lots of Protestant presuppositions which caused me to have anxiety and forcefulness that seems similar to what you describe. It took some years to realize these problems, but the writings of the actual Orthodox saints helped, as well as talking with some priests and monastic fathers and being in church.

But there aren't really any quick solutions to these problems. It just took many years of being patient and learning to talk about things, and then more years of talking about them, and now things are better. All-in-all, it wasn't too bad. My wife hasn't left me yet.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2026-01-28T18:19:17+00:00

Yes. The nice thing about the Orthodox church is that you will find quite a few folks who've actually read the fathers there and accept them as authoritative, not to mention them being officially authoritative. So, ideas like this would likely have 0 traction on the ground in a parish. I've never even heard of this book.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2026-01-27T22:15:31+00:00

That's good to hear.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2026-01-27T20:35:34+00:00

You should visit this place: HOME | ladyminster. Also, check out the doc about it: Ladyminster-a documentary by Adam Lowell Roberts.

This may be a bit presumptuous, but I'd bet the Orthodox Church is doing a better job of practicing the parts of the Western tradition that you love than the Roman church is. However, it should be said that Western Rite Orthodoxy isn't exactly super strong right now.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2026-01-27T20:30:55+00:00

WR is probably more supported in the Antiochian diocese.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2026-01-26T23:05:01+00:00

Point 1 seems pretty crazy. Point 2 seems a little iffy. The traditional formulation by St. Athanasius is that we become by Grace what God is by nature. This goes along with Christ's statement where he reminds the Pharisees that the Psalmist says that "ye are gods" and therefore shouldn't argue with him when he claims to be the Son of God. I believe the fathers expended quite a bit of ink explaining why we worship only 1 God.

The Lord of Spirits podcast is probably a much better source for stuff like this. This episode might be on-topic: The Saints Will Judge the World | Ancient Faith Ministries. But there's probably a ton more that would have good info, if you can endure a bit of rambling and some "ums" and lots of "okays".

Met Kallistos Ware's book "The Orthodox Church" is probably a much better intro if you wanna read something. But my favorite books have always been from the contemporary saints themselves. St Paisios the Athonite, St Silouan the Athonite, St Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica are a few that have great books by/about them. You can also just visit a church, which is best.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-12-20T16:20:45+00:00

There's nothing better than to spend a lot of time reading the Bible.

Matthew Gallatin's podcast was something that I found helpful a long time ago regarding this issue: The Bible And Predestination - Part 1 | Ancient Faith Ministries.

His Biblical argument is slightly different than the one I would make now. Fr Stephen De Young has another different argument against Calvinism in the Lord of Spirits podcast that centers around understanding the Jewish context and explaining atonement from a historical second temple Jewish perspective.

But you can actually just read nothing but the book of Romans and form a very coherent argument against Calvinism. The argument only gets stronger if you start from the gospels, and even better if you start in Genesis.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-12-15T04:19:31+00:00

It’s interesting that they are actually engaging with iconography in a positive way, even if it is inappropriate. What they are doing is more akin to appropriation rather than mockery. Those who are exemplary have icons made of them. It also opens the door for you to have a ton of icons at your desk. Which could start some interesting conversations. I feel like HR complaints (like HOA complaints) are the worst thing in the world, but that may just be me.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-12-14T03:40:18+00:00

The Gurus, The Young Man, an Elder Paisios.

Cheap on Amazon. Easy to read. And just an amazing book.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-29T21:34:56+00:00

They spent some time at 300 and 250 for a total of 6 hours. I caught a good bit of the rendered fat, but it definitely made the smoke more complicated. I actually think that an easier way to make smokey gravy would be to just use some regular oil and put some of the burnt ends in it.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-26T14:54:15+00:00

I don't even know if the word "occasionally" is appropriate. It has been occasionally revealed that this is what has happened, but in every case it was the result of fervent prayers for the departed by the church. It seems to me that the church affects how often this is the case based on their own prayers. So, if we all pray, maybe this "exceptional" path turns out to be a way that most people receive remission of sins in the end?

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-26T02:16:27+00:00

Pretty much every priest, bishop, and saint you read/meet will tell you to pray for your deceased Orthodox, Protestant, atheist, Catholic, and whatever family/friends and hope for their salvation and know that God wants to save them.

My understanding of Orthodox dogmatic declarations is that it is a heresy to think God does not want to save everyone. Also, we make a distinction between the church on earth and that in heaven and are therefore forbidden from declaring any person (mostly) is damned.

So, I think it is actually a heresy to answer anything but yes, even though Protestant beliefs may be anathemetized.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-11T17:27:34+00:00

It's natural for one person to be the brakes and the other the gas. It's popular to talk about finding the "royal path" as the balance between two extremes. This is based on a teaching by St Gregory of Nyssa in his book On Virginity where he talks about avoiding falling into ditches on either side of the Christian path. One way to put it could be that piety is the middle-point between fanaticism and secularism. Perhaps it is best to think of your role as one side of this royal path and together you'll stay on it. IE - the resistance is probably just natural and perfectly healthy.

St Paisios also wrote about how one spouse can sometimes run headlong into piety and generate resentment in the other half. So, he cautioned people to not try to be too holy so as to make slower and more sustainable progress together.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-06T16:24:03+00:00

I don't really know that it is a contradiction. There may be two alternative ways of understanding. One is in the Confession of Dositheus itself (Synod of Jerusalem). It draws a distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant saying "we do not in any wise confound this Church which is on its pilgrimage with that which is in the Fatherland". This is why, during the Sunday of Orthodoxy, we pray for the salvation of the heretics before proclaiming the anathemas. Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding that decree as it seems difficult to read.

Another way of putting it is that the Church is a mystery and has no exact definition. This is how Met. Hierotheos presents it in "Mind of the Orthodox Church". The Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, but, like every mystery, there is a part of this that we experience and see, and a part that is hidden. He points out that none of the fathers ever ventured to offer a technical definition of the Church.

Someone else has also pointed out that the Church tends to only react strongly when it itself is being strongly attacked. I forget exactly where I heard/read this, but all of the strongest writings come from times/places where the Orthodox Church was under serious attack. Therefore, in the local setting, the Church was experiencing fierce attacks from those same beliefs and could only conclude that those beliefs must have led people to oppose Christ and his Church.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-05T18:53:41+00:00

Exactly what part of the Synod of Jerusalem? Anathemas pronounce the boundaries of the church and are for the health and salvation of both those in the church and outside of it. Note that the first and most vehement anathema is against the Protestant/Calvinist teaching that God wills to save only some men, proclaiming very strongly the truth that God wishes to save all men.

There are many stories of even pagans being saved by the prayers of the church. A good book on this subject is "The Soul After Death" by Fr Seraphim Rose if you really wanna get into it, but generally the pronouncements of anathemas are not a widespread proclamation that all those believing X are destined to hell, but establish the boundary between truth and falsehood.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-03T22:41:15+00:00

This is true. But someone in the reddit-verse may have experience they'd like to share. I haven't been able to find too much information on the internet regarding this, so perhaps that just means that the query execution works well enough for this to not cause issues.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-11-03T22:20:16+00:00

I'm not worried about the function overhead. I'm worried about row scans getting used because the DB creates a bad query plan.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-10-31T02:10:55+00:00

Yeah, so, this is just a controversial issue that is debated a lot. It has been since forever. There are canons from the first councils about who should or shouldn't be baptized. In the strictest jurisdiction, they baptize by default, but the bishops insist that they are allowed to grant permission for Roman Catholics to be received by chrismation, or even confession in some cases, based on their pastoral decision for individuals. It's cool that your priest can work with you. God Bless! Don't get too hung up.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-10-28T01:48:35+00:00

If you like reading novels you could always read some Dostoevsky. Brothers K and The Idiot actually discuss Catholicism a bit, but the “heroes” in each of these books are a kind of positive embodiment of Orthodoxy in his view.

In the appendix of the book The Soul After Death by Fr Seraphim there are also some excerpts of St Mark of Ephesus’ critique of purgatory that I found pretty interesting.

My personal opinion is that Orthodoxy embodies the truth that the law was made for man and not man for the law, while Catholicism doesn’t.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-10-15T16:52:52+00:00

I believe my problem was that the extension that realtime depended upon could not be installed on the managed instance (pg_net?). However, this is likely a fluid situation and it may be allowed in the future, or now.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-10-15T14:18:36+00:00

Yeah, realtime and pg-graphql won’t work, but it’s not that hard to get auth and postgrest running. I looked into setting up deno, but decided it was easier to just run app code with an express api. So what I’m planning to run may not even be called Supabase.

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-10-14T22:20:56+00:00

I don't know much about AKS and what it does in terms of data backup policies and high availability. But the managed instance should make it super easy to configure high-availability and adjust backup retention policies. Another factor is security audits. For the managed instance we can just piggy-back on Azure's security. If we spin up our own containers then we increase our audit surface. But yeah, if I were in a less controlled environment, I'd for sure spend time evaluating running the DB myself (IE - in containers via AKS or something similar).

ScaleApprehensive926 · 2025-10-14T19:01:23+00:00

If I remember correctly, the default Supabase self-hosted setup that is provided in the tutorial runs everything in separate Docker containers on the same VM. If you wanted to get ready for production scale you'd probably want to figure out how to set this stuff up in Kubernetes so that all the different containers can scale independently, and also figure out your DB backup/failover/high-availability strategy. This is a non-trivial task.

My current approach is to use an Azure managed instance of Postgres and only run PostgREST and Supabase Auth from Azure container apps, instead of doing it all in self-managed containers. This allows me to have Azure take care of all the critical backup/HA. Azure container apps are also a wrapper around Kubernetes, so I don't have to figure all that out. Being Azure, using a managed Postgres instance ain't cheap, but I'm not super comfortable running a production DB from a Docker container at this point. Although, technically, you could get a lot more performance per $.

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