On September 11, 2020, Father Peter Scorer, the longtime deacon and disciple of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, fell asleep in the Lord weeks after being diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

What does our Lord mean when he says, “If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself”—you must “disown” yourself—“and take up your cross and follow me?” (Mark 8:34) These words form the basis for a living faith, and therefore the basis for an authentic experience and life with the living God.

Writing about suffering and death can be a delicate undertaking, since both are connected to so much emotion and so many doctrines. Many received ideas about these subjects arose in the pre-scientific era, when perceptions of medicine were deeply mixed with superstitions and were often based on misinterpretation of various sacred texts. I am going to look at these subjects from a twenty-first-century perspective rather than one formed in the late Iron Age. This may cause some unease to the more conservative reader.

The world has reached an unusual moment in history: a single disease has made a deep and lasting impression on the population of the entire planet. The sickness and death may last a long time. The consequences of the shutdown necessary to control the burden of the pandemic on medical infrastructure have left joblessness, poverty, and unrest around us. The divisions in US culture are only made more dramatic at this moment, and there is a tangible threat to life as we know it.

One of the “icons” of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy that is receiving a lot of press in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is the communion spoon. In what follows I will first explore what is meant by “icon” in Byzantine theology, why it is that the sacramental life of the Church operates through sacred images or symbols, and why it is important for the faithful who participate in Byzantine Liturgy to know its symbolic language.

The cruel murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and systemic racism have added fuel to ongoing culture wars, debates on social justice, and calls for a wide-ranging revision of the historic and cultural landscape. How does this wide-ranging social upheaval correlate to the history and contemporary self-understanding of Eastern Christianity?

Nearly all Jewish holidays can be summed up in one sentence: They tried to kill us; they failed; let’s eat.
The history of the Jewish people— the religion, the race, the ethnicity, the culture—is, not to put too fine a point on it, written in blood.

The problem of suffering is one of the greatest challenges for the minds of all believers, and the logical and moral problems it poses are perhaps the greatest sources of unbelief for many. While theologians have consecrated volumes to this complex subject, our popular desire for answers and reasons result in a shallow set of commonly repeated tropes—that everything happens for a reason, that God has a plan, that it’s all for the better.

When I was a young girl in the western United States in the 1990s, the portrayals of Orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Christians in the popular culture I consumed were thin on the ground, to say the least. The weddings on television shows looked nothing like the weddings of my cousins, where I was expected to serve as flower girl or junior bridesmaid, in scratchy petticoats and too much eyeshadow.

Opened in 1926 next to a still active retirement house, La Maison Russe, part of the Cimetière de Liers in the parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève des Bois, is the largest Russian cemetery outside Russia. Today, the thorny question of its preservation lies at the crux of the many complex issues regarding relationships between Russian Federation and what remains of White Russian descendants.

“Luz” walks into the intensive care unit alone. She is slight in stature, timid and wide-eyed, wearing an oversized Red Sox sweatshirt that makes her appear even smaller. As the palliative care chaplain, I await her at the bedside of her dying husband, “Julian.” He was rushed to the intensive care unit by ambulance in the early hours of the morning.

“Christ is Risen!” is not a routine greeting of the Orthodox forty days a year, but the joyful news that death is no more—even when it seems to remain. Even when it seems like it is inevitable. Christ has risen, and sooner or later the day of our resurrection and meeting with those we love will come.

The title of this series of lectures by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, published as a book in English and Russian, may cause dismay and confusion. But I would like to warn the reader against getting into an argument about the title without opening the book.

Tom Holland’s recent work, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, is a remarkable history of the Christian faith and Church and how it shaped the world. Much to his credit, Holland’s book stays true to its title. When he says the whole world, he really means all of it, including other faith traditions, people of no faith, and even some of Christianity’s greatest despisers, like Himmler and Stalin.