Nicholas Denysenko

No church or religious community is impervious to events that introduce major societal changes. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine is no exception. Comprised of a complex community of people of diverse backgrounds, these people have been afflicted by a series of external events outside of their control spanning multiple generations. These events include the fall of the Russian empire and the revolution, the Holodomor of 1932–33, World War II, the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukrainian republic, the Euromaidan revolution, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

Contemporary global Orthodoxy is in the process of confronting unprecedented challenges. The most formidable issues facing Church leaders are the relations between Church and state, the structures of the Church, the tension between conciliarity and authority, and seismic shifts in culture, to name a few. The autocephalous Orthodox Churches address these challenges in various ways,[…..]

My mom, Olga, belonged to a generation of immigrants from Ukraine. In our time, we’re learning a lot about immigrants. We express concern for the fundamental right to life and human dignity of immigrants. We also pay attention to the children of immigrants: how will they be fed and educated?

Thirty-five years have elapsed since the untimely passing of Father Alexander Schmemann, but there seems to be a consensus that his legacy remains alive and well in both the Church and the academy. Since church leaders and scholars generally take Schmemann’s influence for granted, rare is the attempt to review the impact of his thought[…..]

What is Christianity? What is the fundamental message of the gospel? These simple questions invite clear and concise responses, but among the churches there is no shortage of complex expressions of Christian identity. One reason for this complexity is that the message of the gospel has often been fused with ideologies to advance worldly political[…..]

In 2019, two events manifested the institutional crisis in the global Orthodox Church: the liquidation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Exarchate for Orthodox Parishes of the Russian Tradition in Western Europe and the controversial creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) as a new autocephalous church. The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate were the[…..]