Blood & Rain

Bloodandrain

Blood & Rain

  1. Blood & Rain Episode 94: Saint John of San Francisco

    10/02/2025

    Blood & Rain Episode 94: Saint John of San Francisco

    Sainthood is something often thought of as far in the past, captured only in the confines of books and starting at us through the frames of icons.  Saint Anthony the Great feels like a superhero at times, Saint George reads like a fairytale, and Saint John the Apostle attained a level of bear-perfection most cannot truly fathom.  Yet a Saint with no shoes walked the streets of Belgrade, Shanghai, Paris, Brussels, and San Francisco with no shoes, performing miracles of healing and clairvoyance through a life of asceticism that can only be understood as superhuman.  Saint John Maximovitch came from a novel Russian family, attended military school and law school, abandoned the world after the events of the Bolshevik Revolution, and was tonsured a monk at seminary in Belgrade.  His duty to Christ would see him leave no student or orphan left behind under the watch of his care making sure every last person in his flock was fed both literally and spiritually as well as educated to the highest standard. He crossed battlefields in Shanghai to visit the sick, he secured asylum for Orthodox refugees to America, and served as both Archbishop of Western Europe and Western America before his repose in Seattle in 1966.  To this day, the cathedral he has built in San Francisco feels like a fortress of Heaven, pouring this palpable grade in the Northwest corner of San Francisco, a city that is in desperate need of God’s Grace. His remains remain in tact, having not decomposed after nearly sixty years since his passing.  Letters asking for his intercession have seen the quick curing of cancer and other grave diseases, as if he his still caring for all of us, his beloved flock.  Words could be spoken in praise of him for hours and still would not do his life a justice.  The Blood & Rain Podcast  Episode 94 Saint John of San Francisco  Enjoy.

    48 min
  2. Blood & Rain Episode 93: An Intro to F. Scott Fitzgerald

    09/24/2024

    Blood & Rain Episode 93: An Intro to F. Scott Fitzgerald

    If one is to understand America in the evolution it’s in now, the iteration of which will remain until America is destroyed or evolves once again, you’ll read “The Great Gatsby.” New York is a microcosm for the health and psyche of the nation, and the author of America’s magnum opus is a man who places his soul into its titular character.  Fitzgerald wrote in a time of the American identity crisis masked with glitz and glam that was known as the Jazz Age.  Aristocratic families fell out of fashion in the rise of the chaotic nouveau riche Broadway, Hollywood, and niche subsections of the industrialist class.  Christianity was under attack by the spirit of shellshock  from WW1, questioning Christian monarchy and its moral framework let alone its eternal truth. Bilphism, occultism, and Nietzscheanism all crept into the gaps where Christianity once dwelled including the corners of Fitzgerald’s rare, gorgeous mind.  American was questioning hierarchy, as European hierarchy was outperformed overseas by raw, American zeal.  The question of how high America could climb and how hard it could fall was answered in the work of Fitzgerald, a man of the highest highs and lowest lows.  Fitzgerald first started writing and gaining popularity for and from Ivy League men who fell enamored with the black hole hearts of flapper women in his novels “This Side of Paradise,” a novel that began the movement that was literary Modernism, “The Beautiful & Damned,” and his short stories known as the “Tales of the Jazz Age.” But he sacrificed his career and popularity to depart from this subject matter to write a or THE Great American novel. He wound up succeeding in this endeavor, but only posthumously. And like his titular character, he fell into a downward spiral by the hand of alcoholism learned form his father and a femme fatale wife who spun into insanity causing his career to become one of financial survival in short stories opposed to fully-realized genius in novels.  Despite this handicap, he became our great nation’s greatest writer.  The Blood & Rain Podcast  Episode 93: “An Intro to F. Scott Fitzgerald”

    56 min
  3. Blood & Rain Episode 91: Orthodoxy & Modern Politics Featuring: Principality of Spirit

    08/25/2024

    Blood & Rain Episode 91: Orthodoxy & Modern Politics Featuring: Principality of Spirit

    The return of the Tsar. The restoration of Constantinople. Orthodox America.  The question is always “how?” There is a notion that is common amongst modern Christians that if the world is not to the perfect standard of Christianity (as judged by themselves), then there is no point in partaking in the discourse of politics and to even go as far as being nihilistic about everything surrounding our world in its form today. Fifty years ago, Father Seraphim Rose wrote to the few Orthodox Christians in the West who were shellshocked at a world so antithetical to the Orthodox Faith. America still in invincible form amidst the rise of material capitalism as a state religion with enlightenment ideas surrounding, and the Soviet Union waging war on Christianity directly. There was little hope for our world to reflect God then.  Yet today, 10,000 churches have been rebuilt in Russia, church attendance is climbing there, and the state is funding the Church to rapidly expand and return to its place as the bedrock of the Russian people.  In America, Orthodox Christianity has 10xd in four years going from 600,000 to 6 million members across all jurisdictions.  Yet there is still this utter pessimism that is the result of a lingering liberalism and nihilism after the conversions still within the minds of many here in the West.  Twenty years ago, the thought of an America increasingly Orthodox with a potential President to be listening to ideas that are increasingly classical this shifting the discourse to values increasingly close to those of our own would never have entered our minds. Yet this pessimism remains.  God has dominion over all, and when one thinks with this mindset, one can detach from his prideful perfectionist projection on the Faith of leaders, and begin to see how God is using them to enact his will.  The Blood & Rain Podcast Episode 91 “Orthodoxy & Modern Politics”  Featuring: Principality of Spirit Enjoy.

    1h 57m
5
out of 5
21 Ratings

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Blood & Rain