by Marie Eliades
Softcover: 473 pages

How do we learn to cook? Becoming a great cook doesn’t happen when we walk into the kitchen for the first time. We pick up a cookbook, glance through the recipes, and decide what to cook. Then we look for ingredients that we have on hand or need to shop for. Do we sit and read the whole book in one sitting, and instantly become gourmets? Good cooking is science, art, and personality. We try new things and grow in our skills. Learning isn’t simple; we experiment, we fail, we add to the recipes, family and friends share their favorites, which become ours. We omit the things we don’t have a taste for, but we have a guide, a cookbook to help us.

We learn to raise our children with similar methods. It takes years to raise Orthodox Christian children. How do we approach this daunting task? Can reading a book provide the answers? When a child is born are we instantly expert parents, or does it entail some time and experience? Orthodox Christian Parenting – Recipes for Raising Children, is not to be read in a day, or applied unilaterally to all families. It is to be consulted, read, reread, and referred to often as we journey through their formative stages, just as we do with our favorite cookbook. This cookbook contains recipes from the Church fathers (old and new), saints, monastics, priests, priest families, and our many experienced friends. We pray that this book—together with your faith and love for Christ, your friends and family, your parish and spiritual father—will provide you with the best ingredients to create your unique family recipe for growing children into loving, faithful, Orthodox Christian adults.