T. R. Valentine Home Page

This used to be the T. R. Valentine Family website, but due to a mutiny within the ranks, it is now the T. R. Valentine website. I will sporadically (because I am a procrastinator with too many interests and a perfectionist with insufficient time) work on (or play around with) these pages — probably in spurts separated by long periods of inactivity.

I have grown tired of trying to implement work-arounds for non-compliant browsers. These pages are a hobby, not a business. I have neither the time nor the energy to test how well my pages work in the various browsers, create non-standard work-arounds to compensate for the idiosyncracies of non-compliant browsers, and begin the testing cycle anew. I've decide to simply ensure my pages have been tested and verified to conform to HTML 4.01 and CSS2 standards. These are old standards.

If the appearance of these pages is wacky, either you need to update your browser or get a compliant browser. In alphabetical order, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera are all good choices. (My personal preference, for a number of reasons, is Opera with Firefox a fairly close second.)

For more details about standards, etc., check out my tech notes.

The basic idea I have for now is to have an (extremely!) eclectic collection of things I find of interest. Some of my interests are steady and ongoing: permanent interests. Some are intermittently recurring. And there are some topics in which I become quite absorbed until satisfying my curiousity on the topic. I then lose interest and it might be years before it piques my curiousity again — if it ever does. I've been told this is typical INTP behaviour, but I am not completely convinced I fit the INTP profile.

So that is my excuse for the eclectic jumble here. If you find something of interest, let me know. If you don't, I'm sure you can find something of interest elsewhere — that is one of the wonderful things about the Web.

My family is very important to me. I used to have a lot of their pictures, but they asked me to remove them. I do have a nice family picture, even if its a few years out of date. Since my children are gradually moving out of our home, it is difficult to get everybody together for a formal picture!

I also work (sporadically!) on family history/genealogy. One of these days (!) I hope to get around to publishing the results of my research — at least on a web site. I am particularly interested in the descendants of James Valentine (1801-1891) and Catharine Ackerman Valentine (1809-1898) of Woodbridge, New Jersey. They had nine children who lived into adulthood:

Maria Valentine (1830-1899, married Josiah D. Drake)
William Valentine (1833-1883, married Martha Coddington)
Benjamin Valentine (1838-1908, married Mary I. Eldrige)
Robert Newton Valentine (1840-1919, married Mary Dell Mercer)
Mulford Day Valentine (1843-1911, married Rachel V. Camp)
James Rossiter Valentine (1845-1919, married Sarah Adaline Anness)
Howard Valentine (1848-1917, married Augusta Warner)
Edwin W. Valentine (1849-1921, married Emma E. Harned)
Oscar G. Valentine (1853-1922, married Mary D. Coley)

If you have any information on the descendants of these people and/or are looking for information about their descendants, please let me know.

Probably my most passionate interest is Orthodox Christianity. My interests include Christian History, Doctrine, Apologetics, the Filioque, Ecumenical Synods (aka Ecumenical Councils), the Church Fathers, the Bible, Holy Tradition, and Conversion stories.

My most basic page on Orthodox Christianity is what Orthodox Christian believe. Another page has some links to some prayers — not nearly enough. I hope to add some additional links and add some more information on the Psalter. I have a page devoted to the Holy Scripture, including a table showing the canonical books of the Old Testament from the perspective of Orthodox Christians, Papal Christians, Protestant Christians, and Ethiopian Christians. I have been told it is the best thing available showing the differences.

Links to the story of my conversion and the conversion of others to Orthodox Christianity is located on the Conversion Stories page. I have a page devoted to the issue of the Filioque, with links to articles written by yours truly and others. It is a very important issue too often ignored by too many people. As far as I know, it is the only place where an English translation of the Tomus of Faith Against Beccus approved by the Synod of Blachernae is available. This is, as far as I know, the only Orthodox synodical response to the Filioque.

The page that has received the majority of my effort is the Essays and Books page. It has links to some old books, including Abbé Guettée's The Papacy: Its Historic Origin and Primitive Relations which, although polemical, shows what Christian history really demonstrates about the Latin papacy. It also contains a fair amount of material from the Slavophiles, especially Alexei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireyevsky. I slowly keep adding to this page as I find material of interest to me (and, I hope, of interest to others).

I have to put in a big thank you to my local library: the Plano Community Library District. They do a superb job of obtaining, through Interlibrary Loan, books I could never afford to purchase if I could even find them. (I also have to link to their home page because I maintain the site!)

If — a very big if — I get around to adding material of other topics of interest to me, I'll add them to this page.

Validated as Strict HTML 4.01 — before Geocities got hold of it!