...The essays gathered in this double volume present a multicolored tapestry of today’s Orthodoxy across countries and continents...

Can a good tree bear evil fruit, and a bad tree bear good fruit? (Matt. 7:18). With reference to these words from the Gospel of Matthew, we would like to begin the discussion about the current state of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP)...

It is no coincidence that ecclesiology, as a theological discipline, emerged in modern times alongside the rise of secularization. During this period, the Church—once embracing the entire world—suddenly found herself placed within it and surrounded by it. This world no longer regarded itself as part of the Church and often rejected her outright. Sometimes, the Church responded to this rejection by rejecting the world in turn. It was as if she were standing in front of a mirror, mimicking the gestures of the secular world, with the difference that her right hand in the mirror appeared as her left...

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...

Since its inception as an independent jurisdiction in 1920, ROCOR had at least five key tasks: 1) pastoral care for the refugees of the diaspora; 2) preservation of church tradition; 3) giving witness to human rights abuses; 4) political resistance to communism; and 5) missionary outreach—this last task an unexpected burden. A brief look at each of these follows. This article concludes by suggesting that the first and last of these tasks may jointly offer a path to the future for ROCOR...

The closing decades of the 19th century were a period of dramatic transformation within the Russian Empire. Industrialization was rapidly changing the physical and social landscape, while the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had set in motion new patterns of migration, urbanization, and aspiration. The Orthodox Church, long accustomed to a stable and hierarchical society, suddenly found itself addressing a population whose needs and expectations were in flux. Many clergy and laypeople alike felt both excitement and anxiety as Russia lurched toward modernity...

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...

Missionary work is closely tied to the life of the early Church. In fact, it is the holy work of evangelizing the Gentiles that our Lord Jesus Christ began with his divine teaching and his sacrifice on the cross, and, in general, with his entire redemptive work. The apostles and disciples of Christ continued this holy missionary work, obeying his command on the day of his ascension into heaven: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. Amen.” (Matt. 28:19-20)...

Over the past three and a half decades, Europe has undergone profound change. The collapse of communism and subsequent democratization of Eastern Europe after 1989, along with integration into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), forced former communist countries to adapt rapidly. Romania, which joined NATO in 2004 and EU in 2007, underwent painful but ultimately successful reforms. Among domestic actors shaping this transformation, one of the more influential ones has been the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC), which claims adherence from about 74% of the country’s population of 19 million, according to the 2021 population census... 

Paradoxically, during the Soviet era, a time when compliance with the Soviet government was mandatory, churches exhibited a significant degree of resistance, if not outright opposition, to the Soviet regime....

Three centuries have passed since the fateful date of 1724 and the events that led to the split of the Greek Patriarchate of Antioch. Far from bringing the two Greek churches, Orthodox and Catholic, closer together, the commemoration in 2024, celebrated unilaterally on both sides, has only highlighted the gap that risks distancing and alienating them from one another...

I’m a Christian who hates convert stories. I hate the genre itself and the way it implicitly teaches its creators and audience to think about faith. Some of it is temperament. As someone trained in the scholarship of critical and comparative religion, specifically in biblical studies, and in Greco-Roman classics, the convert story bothers my sensibilities. It seems to me to rely on simplifications and demonization of the “Other,” whether that “Other” is “secularism,” another religion, or another form of Christianity...

St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians 5:20- 33 is a traditional Epistle reading for a wedding. In what follows, however, I have included the preceding verses going back to 5:17 in order to include the entire grammatical sentence as St. Paul presents it rather than picking up mid-phrase. I believe it also helps to set the stage for the mutually supportive and ultimately apolitical mystery (known as “marriage”) that he explores...

From nearly every hill in Belgrade, the monumental Cathedral of Saint Sava, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world, dominates the horizon. Its history reflects, in many ways, the evolving relationship between the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) and the state, as well as the Church’s place within society. The idea for the Cathedral on Vračar Hill first emerged after the Berlin Congress in 1878, when Serbia gained independence, as the pursuit of national sovereignty was inseparable from the quest for religious autonomy, fusing the two identities into a single bond....

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... 

“Peace Unto All” (www.mir-vsem.info) was established in Germany in October 2023, when it became clear that the persecution of anti-war priests in Russia had become systematic. At the time, around ten priests were sanctioned for refusing to recite the prayer for the “Victory of Holy Rus” and for publicly opposing the so-called “holy war.” The founders, Father Valerian Dunin-Barkovsky, journalist Svetlana Neplikh-Thomas, musician Pavel Fahritdinov, and this writer, recognized the need for action...

In one of his insightful articles, David Bentley Hart notes that, in contrast to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky is revered as a “prophet” and remains the hero of many new Western converts to Orthodoxy. Many Christians of other confessions and many “rigorist” believers in Eastern Orthodox countries believe similarly.Likewise, the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948) describes Dostoyevsky’s art as “prophetic,” as “it unveils the secret of man.”...

I do not recall when I first read Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s article “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?”1 Whenever it was, it powerfully confirmed the hopeful universalism that had formed in my soul in the mid-90s after reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? To my surprise, I found Ware more persuasive than Balthasar—more persuasive, perhaps, than he intended. His eschatological optimism permeates his article. One might even be excused for concluding that he truly believes that all will be saved, though he qualifies his confidence with this maxim: We may hope and pray for the reconciliation of all, but we must not teach it as doctrine....

Annick de Souzenelle was a French Orthodox thinker, born in Rennes on November 4, 1922. Raised in the Catholic faith and educated at the Institut Notre-Dame des Champs in Paris, she eventually broadened her spiritual search to include other religious traditions. In 1958, she was received into the Orthodox Church by Father Eugraph Kovalevsky (1905–1970), founder of the Église Catholique Orthodoxe de France (ECOF), which was then under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, with pastoral oversight by Saint John Maximovitch, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco...

On August 10, 2024, psychologist and psychotherapist Natalia Skuratovskaya passed away. “I am a non-systemic person in the church,” she often said, but nevertheless, Natasha managed to accomplish a great deal and assist many people. Her sober, critical, yet responsible voice was heard in the Russian Church for two decades...