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 All Russia.

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 primary church institutions involved in these events.

In a lecture in 1947, the very influential pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott shocked a lot of people by openly acknowledging that parents and children sometimes hate each other, and that this is not only perfectly normal, but a necessary achievement for healthy development among children.

Anna Akhmatova was one of the greatest poets of twentieth-century Russia. As a young woman, she visited France and Italy, where her portrait was drawn by Amedeo Modigliani. She lived through two world wars, the Stalinist terror, the Leningrad blockade and famine, and exile to Tashkent. She was banned from publishing for many years under Stalin.

Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) was the founder of a theological program that has become the main paradigm for Orthodox theology in our era, the so-called Neopatristic Synthesis. Begun in the early 1920s, his work sought to renew Orthodox theology on the basis of a constructive and interpretive return to the tradition of the church fathers, and to liberate theological method from certain Western scholastic influences.

The sacrament of ordination, and its control of and impact on clergy and laity, have been on the radar of the Church and on my mind of late, especially with the elections of a number of bishops worldwide and the surrounding debates about hierarchy, jurisdiction, and authority. However, the theology of ordination has frequently become so convoluted and clouded— by mysticism, misinterpretation, and even sometimes malevolence—that it invariably distorts any meaningful conversation about priesthood, power, and primacy in the Church.

In the original foreword to his book Christian Faith and Same-Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections, Fr. Thomas Hopko recounts a story about a gay man he received into the Orthodox Church and with whom he became friends. On reading a manuscript for Fr. Tom’s book, a memory came to the man. As a child, he and a friend had frequented a park where they hand-fed peanuts to the squirrels. One day, older boys took their peanuts from them and proceeded to feed the squirrels with one hand and beat them with sticks with the other.

“Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, on the shore of a great sea, there stood a mighty and wonderful city. In that city lived a great and pious king.” This is how many stories that we read to our children at bedtime begin. But this is also how we Orthodox often seem to define our Christian identity, by thinking in terms of “ancient faith,” “eternal tradition,” hagiographic stories written in the style of fairy tales, and, most importantly, by referencing our Christian witness to the times and circumstances of homicidal tyrants and spectacular martyrdoms.

In the Orthodox Church, the unifying dynamism sparked by Athenagoras I reached its peak at the Chambésy conference in June 1968. Since then, we have witnessed the ebb of this dynamism and the reappearance—indeed, the aggravation—of fault lines which he had temporarily covered or sought to heal.

It is no wonder that the lead actors in The Two Popes, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, have been nominated for Golden Globes, Oscars, and British Academy Film Awards. After all, the 2019 film, by director Fernando Meirelles, is a character study, the very kind of movie that relies on actors’ skillful portrayal. At the center of the film are Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, who represent the two sides of the coin that was John Paul II.

On September 1, 2019, Archbishop Nikon of Boston, New England, and the Albanian Archdiocese (OCA) fell asleep in the Lord after a long battle with cancer. His Eminence’s repose has left an enormous void in the lives of his family and friends and in the lives of the two dioceses he lovingly pastored.