April 11, 2021
Why do Orthodox Christians call Easter Pascha? For all Christians, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant, the heart of our faith is the Resurrection of Christ. At first, the celebration of the Resurrection was called Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, because the...
April 18, 2017
If you’re not Orthodox, it can be hard to understand what your Orthodox Christian friends have been doing for the last week, or why they’re so bleary-eyed today. Let me see if I can explain it. To imagine Pascha, think of what it would be like if you combined the...
March 27, 2017
When my kids were small, I wasn’t a big fan Easter baskets full of candy. It’s not that I didn’t allow my kids to have candy. I did. But they’d had candy, lots of candy, at Halloween and Christmas and Valentine’s Day. For them, candy was the ordinary way to celebrate...
March 16, 2017
When I’m reviewing a picture book, I usually start with the story. But for Piccolina and the Easter Bells, I want to start with the art. Piccolina and the Easter Bells is an old book, almost as old as I am. When it was first published, color printing was far more...
March 9, 2017
Phyllis Limbacha Tildes, author and illustrator of The Magic Babushka, knew something about butterflies that I didn’t know. She knew that, in Slavic culture, butterflies were once associated with witches. Perhaps it’s because of the way caterpillars change into...