Featured Author of the Antiochian Archdiocese: Fr. Hans Jacobse
Fr. Johannes Jacobse has been a priest for twenty years. Born in Holland, he has a B.A. from the University of Minnesota, an M.Div. from St. Vladimir’s Seminary, studied the Greek language at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and is a fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He is married and has one daughter.
Fr. Hans edits the web site Orthodoxy Today that discusses social and moral issues from an Orthodox Christian and the larger Judea/Christian framework. The success of Orthodoxy Today led to the founding of the American Orthodox Institute, a research and educational organization that engages the cultural issues of the day within the Orthodox Christian moral tradition, which Fr. Hans heads. His editorials and essays have been published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Duluth News Tribune, International Herald Tribune, Hellenic Voice, Breakpoint web site, Front Page Magazine web site, Institute for Religion and Democracy web site, Discover web site, and more. His podcasts can be heard on Ancient Faith Radio.
To book Fr. Hans Jacobse as a speaker, please visit the Orthodox Speakers Bureau web site.
Featured
One Word of Truth Outweighs the Whole World
This essay is drawn from a talk given to the leadership of Orthodox Christian Laity on March 9, 2009, in Pinellas Park, Fl.
When Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave his Nobel Lecture in 1970, he quoted this Russian proverb: "One word of truth outweighs the whole world."
Let me say it again: "One word of truth outweighs the whole world."
We know Solzhenitsyn's story. In WWII Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet Army officer who was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the Gulags under Stalin. In prison Christ captures him. The encounter changes him, so much so that he clandestinely wrote the three volume "Gulag Archipelago" that laid bare the moral bankruptcy of Marxism. His work caused the collapse of the Marxist establishment in Western Europe and tilled the intellectual ground that led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
"One word of truth outweighs the whole world" is a proverb that draws deep from the well of Christian anthropology and cosmology. Solzhenitsyn, like the simple peasants from whom he drew this wisdom, grasped that the most powerful agent of change in the world is a word spoken in truth. The proverb captured the insight from Holy Scripture.