“The Holy Fathers likened prayer to a golden chain hanging down from the heavens to Earth.  As lovers of prayer try to pull the chain closer to them, they rise closer to heaven in spirit.”—Patriarch Poghos of Adrianapolis

If a people progresses, it takes its first step from the family home; If illuminated, its light derives from the family lamp; If united, its spirit and bond is the family; If empowered, its strength and arm is the family; If it prospers, its treasury and treasurer is the family; If a people wants to inherit heaven after earth by keeping its…

“Our record of Christian witness should not be presented as something belonging solely to the past: a dead heritage of archaic values and lovely-but-irrelevant items in a museum. Rather, it needs to be presented as a dynamic alternative to the prevailing world-view, and as a rebuke to the nihilism of post-modern culture.” –His Holiness Catholicos Karekin I 

“At that time our blessed and wonderful land of Armenia became truly worthy of admiration, where by the hands of two colleagues, suddenly, in an instant, Moses, the law-giver, along with the order of the prophets, energetic Paul with the entire phalanx of the apostles, along with Christ’s world-sustaining gospel, became Armenian-speaking.” –Koriun Vardapet, On the Invention of the Armenian Alphabet, The Life…

October 13 is the feast of the Holy Translators in the Armenian Apostolic Church. To celebrate God’s gift of the Armenian heritage, Der Hovnan will provide 36 short daily translations of wisdom from the Armenian Church tradition. After you read and reflect, please share with others to become yourselves—Holy Translators!