New Skete Monasteries News

By Brother Luke It’s 10 PM Sunday night, and I am with Shiloh in the puppy kennel whelping room, wondering if this will be the night she gives birth. She was x-rayed the previous Monday and confirmed to be carrying eight puppies. We are approaching a decision about whether or not she will need a C-section. Tuesday would be the last day to wait. Shiloh was in my room Saturday night and spent the night panting and moving around the room, but she did not break her water and gave no other signs that she was going to have a puppy. Sunday during the day she was calmer, but she would eat only dog biscuits and lean treats, not real food. I now wondered whether I should close the kennel and take her back to my room for the night or stay here and wait. But then she began to nest, and it looked like she was releasing her “water,” which is the ultimate sign that she is committed to giving birth. That made the decision easy. We were going to stay in the kennel for the night. Now I began to stare a...

By Brother Stavros   First Reformed On a sunny hot Father’s Day, as the monastery’s representative in the local council of churches I attended the Baccalaureate for the Cambridge Central School’s graduating class. It was held in a handsome red brick church dating from the late 1700s and has been lovingly restored and maintained by its congregation just outside the village of Cambridge. Upstate New York has no shortage of Colonial-era churches, calendar perfect and uniform in their creamy white, or atypical in Coila’s case, being brick, but surrounded by majestic oaks, maples and ash trees as old as the churches. One such supplies the title and venue for a new film, First Reformed by Paul Schrader, starring Ethan Hawke as the Rev. Ernst Toler. In a web review Jacob Knight captures its complexity: Here he's a man hanging by his fingernails over a mournful chasm, counting his numerous failures (a lost son, a failed marriage) as cancer and booze begin to eat away at his...

By Ida Williams, Director of Marketing and Communications Washington County, New York. Population 61,620 people, 49,807 cows, 2,071 sheep and goats, 7,234 egg-producing chickens, and 1,736 pigs. Home to 47 vegetable farms and 45 orchards. And amid the 831 square miles of rolling fields, orchards, vineyards, and livestock-dotted pastures is New Skete Monastery. Washington County's Seal  While it makes sense that a monastery would want to establish itself in a rural area like Washington County, an area free from traffic, noise, bright lights, and even traffic lights, it is surprising what having a monastery in our midst means to our county. For some of us it means jobs. New Skete has fifteen year-round employees. Office, dog kennels, maintenance, and bakery all require skilled people from the area to help the monastery operate. The monasteries also hire local businesses for HVAC, construction, snow plowing, and printing, and the Nuns purchase supplies from a local d...