Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home

by Anthony M. Coniaris

Book Overview

Like the priest, parents represent God to their children. They are religious educators just by being parents. Here is a book filled with ideas to help Orthodox Christian parents become effective... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0937032077
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Light and Life Pub. Co.
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

When love as family overrides selfish thoughts

Author of more than 70 monographs, study guides, and pamphlets, Anthony M. Coniaris released the 11th-edition of this text in 2004. The new and expanded 11th-edition contains 86 unique 'entries' consisting of one-to-four pages length--not chapters per se, which include introductory overviews of "What the Bible Says About Children," "Church Fathers on Child Rearing," with Preface and Foreword that appear unchanged since the first edition in 1977. Father Coniaris has served more than 50 years to date as Priest assigned to St. Mary Greek Orthodox Church (GOAA), Minneapolis, MN (currently Priest Emeritus). The publisher for his media is Light & Life Publishing Company, which is the Orthodox Christian company he founded in 1966. Light & Life displays its inventory on more than 200 pages (2009-10 catalog), and arguably earns its self-promoted reputation as the world's largest Orthodox Christian supplier of books, teaching aids, CD's, video, icons, and pamphlets. The layout and look of the 'Making God Real' text are practical, thus weaving various pastoral themes and sage advice across a span of 47 entries, before introducing the liturgical year with initial calendar entry in text of Great Lent. Careful editing prevented what might have amounted to derailing the progression of entries by a mid-manuscript introduction of the liturgical year. Indeed, the text maintains a steady stream already established in the first 47 entries of how parents ought to raise children to sanctify all that children learn by doing what all family members proclaim of Christ in speech and action. Faith in action is the perspective of the Christian community, which Coniaris addresses to the nuclear family. But his advice to parents of children extends naturally to lifelong service within the Church and builds a global ethos of "making God real." Fearless in voice and tone, the author attends to topics like sex education in the home and what to say about death to children with similar respect and candor as the essential theme of receiving Christ often in the Eucharist. To paraphrase the author's advice concerning frequent Communion (e.g. p. 112), he depicts bread and wine as extensions of Christ's humility and desire to serve. Absent from the book are entries pertaining to the Internet, music, inter-faith marriages, respect for families of religions that differ from Orthodoxy and families for whom there is animus toward any religion, use of cellular technologies, families without children, blended families, and how to maintain open-channels of communication in families with pre-pubescent and teenage children. Therefore, I believe that the title should be re-worded to signify the book's actual content, viz. a focus on families with children up to age 12. My recommendation brings enthusiastic support of the author's pastoral tone, and suggested use of this text as part of parenting/god-parenting classes. These classes ought to be requisite staples in six-month long or an