Culture and Tradition

Animals appear throughout Orthodox Christian tradition — in iconography, in the lives of saints, in the church calendar. An exploration of how the natural world is woven into one of the world’s oldest Christian traditions.

The first in a series drawing on Ralph and Adelin Linton’s scholarly study of Halloween — tracing the holiday from its Celtic and Christian roots through centuries of transformation to its modern form.

An introduction to our series on the history of Halloween — why a toy maker from Bulgaria is reading forgotten 20th-century scholarship on one of the world’s most contradictory holidays.

Halloween’s Christian and pre-Christian roots, what children actually need when confronting scary things, and three concrete points to help families approach the holiday more thoughtfully.

Angels in their original theological and artistic tradition are neither sweet nor decorative. Here is a serious look at what they are, where the idea comes from, and why the modern image bears little resemblance to the original.