Inga Leonova

As I was preparing this reflection on the story of Mary of Egypt, I was marveling at the many facets that this story offers when viewed through the lens of our experiences: what has been, what may have been, how the stories are told, and where the light shines through them, the light everlasting, the light of hope that is offered to us all if we are able to see and follow it…

OCA’s claim to autocephaly as a unifying jurisdiction for the American Orthodox stems from the original mission and ethos of the Russian Metropolia, representing the missionary ethos of the Russian Church. Historically, the Russian Church has always had a very strong missionary mindset, conveniently coinciding but going down this particular rabbit hole, I would just remind us that the Orthodox Church in America recounts its history from the 1794 mission to Alaska and the ensuing Russian evangelization of the Alaskan natives…

When people get into involved conversations about religious food customs, I almost always think of my great-aunt. During World War II, she was evacuated from Kyiv and spent the war in a godforsaken village in a Muslim area of the Caucasus Mountains…

Our society is in the throes of identity politics. Debates about what constitutes identity, what are “acceptable,” “assumed,” and “constructed” identities often reach war-like intensity. The pressure to self-identify within prescribed parameters and the social consequences of choosing a governing identity create a form of social neurosis. And the neurosis is compounded by the currently[…..]

The Russian Spiritual and Cultural Center in Paris has been mired in controversy and scandal from the beginning. The genesis of the project, according to the official story, was the request by the late Patriarch Alexey II to the presidents of Russia and France for a new cathedral in Paris for the use of the[…..]

The relationship of Christianity and Judaism was a perennial theme for Sergii Bulgakov, from his 1906 essay on the antisemitism of Karl Marx, to his horror at the destruction he attributed to the Jewish leadership of the Bolshevik revolution, to his polemic against Nazi ideologues, to his final and decisive eschatological conclusions.

Amid the diversity of twentieth-century Orthodox saints, the stories of two women, Princess Alice of Greece and Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, illustrate how lives that begin in high privilege can develop into service and even martyrdom. Contemporary discourse tends toward a negative view of privilege, especially privilege bestowed by accident of birth. What it[…..]

The history of church architecture in America reflects in wood, brick, stone, and concrete the turbulent history of the establishment and development of Orthodoxy in America.

In June of 2000 Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh gave a long interview in London, part of which was published several days later by the Parisian Russian language newspaper Russkaya Mysl. In that interview, Vladyka Anthony pondered the atmosphere of internal fear which was beginning to permeate the Orthodox Church.

The Just War theory emerged in Western Christianity and never became rooted in Eastern Christianity. Instead, in the East, there is a relatively undeveloped theology that war is sometimes forced on a nation under attack, but is only justified to the extent that the nation is defending itself from invasion.

On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant, a self-proclaimed white supremacist from Australia, shot up two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing fifty men, women, and children at prayer. The 76-page manifesto he published online prior to the attack contains some of the predictable code terms that litter white supremacist and nationalist literature, websites, and social[…..]

“Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, on the shore of a great sea, there stood a mighty and wonderful city. In that city lived a great and pious king.” This is how many stories that we read to our children at bedtime begin. But this is also how we Orthodox often[…..]