Peter Anthony Baktis

I entered the United States Chaplaincy in the summer of 1990, a time that I thought was relatively peaceful and stable. It had been almost one year since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one year before the demise of the Soviet Union. Little did I know that my next twenty-five years of service would begin with the invasion of Kuwait and end with the Iraqi war. Twenty-five years of an army at war in places that most Americans did not even know, such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name a few… 

Identity is defined as “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is; a close similarity or affinity; and in mathematics, a transformation that leaves an object unchanged.” (Oxford Dictionary) How do these definitions help us understand Orthodox Christian tradition and the question of identity? In particular, how can an authentic Orthodox[…..]