Katherine Kelaidis

If you are waiting for a thoughtful Orthodox perspective on modern love, Waiting and Dating will leave you still waiting…

To believe that there will ever be a singular American Orthodox Church is, in light of the past half century’s worth of evidence, the same as believing that you will one day receive a letter from Hogwarts: A fun and childish fantasy that comes from reading comforting fiction. Moreover, Eastern Orthodox Christianity will never be[…..]

There is little doubt that our self-esteem as a species has benefited greatly from the fact that we are from an extended family that is quickly dying off. We are the last surviving members of our genus Homo and one of only eight surviving species of the family Hominidae (colloquially known as the “Great Apes”)[…..]

The term “theology of the body” derives from a series of 129 lectures by the same name given by Pope John Paul II between 1979 and 1984. These lectures, widely considered the first major teachings of the late pope’s pontificate, sought to establish a comprehensive anthropology in which the human body was understood as a[…..]

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 incarnation is by far the most shocking aspect of Christianity. The resurrection of a god is not an unusual feature of mythic traditions around the world: Osiris, Baldr, Quetzalcoatl, and Dionysus all came back from the dead. But the idea that a god, let alone the God, would take on a mortal body and[…..]

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, historians started to consider that they had gotten the Middle Ages all wrong. The glimmering light of antiquity had not been extinguished in a moment, like a snuffedout candle.

When is an age “dark”? It was the great Renaissance scholar Petrarch who, in the 1330s, first used the term “Dark Age” to describe his own time, a epoch he saw in sharp contrast to the bright glories of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. Within a hundred years, historians such as Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo[…..]

Nothing dooms literature like dishonesty. Thus, unsurprisingly, it is above all the ability to speak honestly that distinguishes between quality writing and the vast majority of what is produced by contemporary Orthodox Christian women in America. So you might say that what I want to consider here is the kind of courage it takes to[…..]

1,092 miles separate Constantinople and Moscow. The only two cities on earth ever to have served as capitals of Orthodox Christian empires are today the seats of the two most important, powerful, and (perhaps most significantly, in this image-driven age) visible Orthodox hierarchs: Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and[…..]

When I was a young girl in the western United States in the 1990s, the portrayals of Orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Christians in the popular culture I consumed were thin on the ground, to say the least. The weddings on television shows looked nothing like the weddings of my cousins, where I was expected to[…..]