For the past fifty years I’ve been living with a remarkable photograph. I’m looking at it now. It was taken on July 16, 1969, by an astronaut who was gazing at his home planet through a thick glass window. I wonder if he didn’t feel like a new Bartimaeus, a man born blind whose eyes were miraculously opened.

Fifty-three years have passed since a band of men, women, and children walked from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery as witnesses to the black Americans’ right to vote. This march, memorable for all Americans, has special significance for Orthodox Christians in this country.

While it is customary for Orthodox Christians to look to canonical legislation when they seek to evaluate the challenges of the contemporary world, it is rarely the case that inquirers properly account for the full context or Sitz im Leben of the canons.

Although the Orthodox churches have explicitly condemned ecclesiastical racism, or ethnophyletism, they have never forbidden Orthodox Christians of shared language, ethnicity, or geography from using religion as a criterion for who is “us” and who is “not us.” This kind of nationalism—that is, the process by which a group of people becomes recognizable to itself and to others as a nation—is not contrary to Orthodoxy.

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 media threads everywhere, such as “the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people” and “mass invasion.”

An official document of understanding between two communities necessarily begins with an encounter, and so it must be for the Orthodox Christians and the Jews. Spurred by the tragedies of the Second World War, many in the Christian community have recognized the importance of such an encounter, not only for the healing of God’s people, but also for the mutual spiritual enrichment that is the desired fruit of such an exchange.

The modern emergence of nationalism is often interpreted as evidence of the modern decline of religion. Nationalism can be understood as the defining of a political community in terms of a single territory or ethnic group, and as ruled by a single state that predicates itself on the legitimacy and consent of its nation. What has made this conception of human community so compelling, from the nineteenth century to the present, is the decentering of religious faith.

For their ongoing Icons on Ammo Boxes project, the contemporary Ukrainian artists Sofia Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko salvage the wooden lids of ammunition boxes from the eastern front in Ukraine, which has been destabilized for the past five years by Russian-backed separatist forces. Then, with egg tempera—and, in some cases, colored pencils—Atlantova and Klymenko transform these panels into icons of Christ and the saints.

“Without eschatology,” Father John Meyendorff wrote, “traditionalism is turned only to the past: it is nothing but archeology, antiquarianism, conservatism, reaction, refusal of history, escapism.” The eschatological dimension is a fundamental—but nearly forgotten—dimension of Christianity. Christianity is inconceivable without its eschatological outlook.

Any Orthodox reckoning with nationalism must include a reckoning with antisemitism. The term “nationalism” as defining a particular ideological and political phenomenon belongs to the newest history, as does the modern understanding of religion as a set of beliefs and customs.

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 objectives since the first centuries of Christianity.

Joseph Clarke’s review of the book Theology and Form by Nicholas Denysenko reminded me of my experience designing and constructing Saint Mary’s Antiochian Orthodox Church in Mays Hill, New South Wales, Australia. My building and development firm took over when the parish could not get financing to build an elaborate, Hagia Sophia-like design. The late Archbishop Gibran (Ramlawi) entrusted me with the project and I wholeheartedly accepted.

“We will rebuild it”: Even before the April 15, 2019 fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris had been extinguished, French President Emmanuel Macron had already defiantly promised to lead a major reconstruction project. But what rebuilding means is a complicated technical, artistic and political question.