Tony Woodlief | Author

The Sermons

Shepherds and wolves

Another revelation of systematic, years-long sexual exploitation of girls in England, and the accompanying failure of men whose jobs are to protect the vulnerable. A failure driven by ineptitude, class bias, and fear of racism accusations amidst a judicial machinery that responds more reliably against thought crimes than actual crimes against children. You can read …

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Those responsible

Since the day Cain raised a rock to Abel’s head, men have been about the business of slaughtering one another. Oceans of blood spilled and still something pierces our innermost hearts when it is a child who does the killing, when his victims are other children, when his motive seems nothing other than to fill …

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The Gratitude Inoculation

I’ve not been what you would call a grateful person. The truth is, for most of my life I’ve been a surly, critical, stew-on-the-inside-when-things-don’t-go-precisely-my-way kind of person. In the movie Sling Blade, Dwight Yoakam’s character Doyle indicts himself as “assholish.” Yeah, that shoe fits. I probably don’t have to tell you ingratitude is like a …

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Hell and Vegas

As I write this they haven’t determined a final count of the dead and dying in Las Vegas. How many homes are filled this night with weeping? Too many, is one answer. Not enough, is another. I have nothing to say about the law, except that if opinions about it were limited to those who …

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Single-minded

Maybe you’ll like my latest Image essay, about the struggle for single-mindedness among we sophisticated, double-minded types. Here’s an excerpt: “The soul will follow the body,” is how Fr. Stephen Freeman summarizes a point made by the Christian monk Evagrius in the fourth century A.D. Do what is right, and your resistant soul will learn. …

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Temple of bones

Every baptism in the Orthodox Church entails an exorcism, as I learned last Easter when I was baptized into the Church. It was nothing desperate and dramatic like some of us remember from The Exorcist; in truth the devil and his minions flee from Christ and the Cross, having been sundered by both. There was …

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Fair

I’ve been working on contentment, which mostly means I’ve been praying for God to help me be content in whatever circumstances I find myself, then griping at him when I face trials that might help me learn contentment. But I’m trying, I swear. Those of you who know me know that my life thus far …

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Thy kingdom come

I don’t think they love their children any less than I love my own, which tells me something about what their lives must be like, to send their babies away. Their children stream northward in droves—as many as 60,000 this year—and we don’t want them. We don’t want their skin lesions and their hungry bellies, …

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Lament

When we tucked what remained of that little girl into the earth, I was relieved it was over. I was filled with something that felt like transcendence. We had weathered the storm, we had kept the faith, we had given her back to God, and now we would await patiently the life of the world …

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The sickness

I write this on the day Fred Phelps, pretender to ministry, hater of gays, vitriolic picketer of soldiers’ funerals, has gone forth into the Judgement he welcomed for others. In the days leading up to his demise there was talk among some, who hate him deeply for his hatred, of picketing his funeral. Of holding …

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