“I, John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, ‘Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches.’” (Rev. 1:9–11)

It is a truism that Orthodox are traditional. But what do we mean by “tradition”? More specifically, how do we differentiate between “Holy Tradition” and tradition as mere habit or formalized custom? Orthodox believers frequently use the terms interchangeably, confusing the capital “t” variety with the lowercase “t” one, and all too often, this confusion is used to serve ideological ends. Just as, in a missionary context, an overzealous imposition of Christian “behaviors” and customs can often conceal a colonialist agenda, so an excessively narrow and reductionist view of tradition can serve reactionary, clericalist, or fundamentalist purposes.

Thoughtful readers will feel some melancholy upon finishing On Christian Leadership: The Letters of Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky (1947–1955), but this should not discourage anyone from reading this good book. Universally acknowledged as theologians of the first order, Fathers Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky left significant legacies. Each produced a sizable collection of writings that has become an object of scholarly study.

In the spring of 2009, freshly graduated from college, I found myself on a combined pilgrimage and backpacking trip in Albania. I always had an intense intellectual curiosity about modern Albania and its special place in European history, its confluence of competing cultures and religions, its unique language, its ancient Christian history, the bizarre stories relayed from its oppressive twentieth-century regime, and most importantly, the impact of Albanian-American Orthodox clergy and leaders on my own spiritual formation as a young adult.

The Church of Albania is a unique case in the modern history of the Orthodox Church. In 1967, by decree of the communist regime then ruling the country, all religions were banned. Albania was the first officially-declared atheist nation in the world.

These photographs portray recent services at Orthodox parishes in the Diocese of Western Kenya. The first few images are of Saint Demetrios parish in Mlimani, a farming village with a population of about two thousand, located five miles off the main highway between Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda.

Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk’s death on January 12, 2021, released a flood of memories.
I first met Filaret in April 1984. I was one of several people from the West invited to participate in a discussion of “Violence, Nonviolence, and Liberation” he hosted at the Moscow Patriarchate’s Office of External Affairs.

One of the long-awaited releases in the field of religious and medieval studies is George E. Demacopoulos’ Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade. The book analyzes two major Latin and two major Byzantine texts from the thirteenth century as well as the Chronicle of Morea, a product of the Byzantine-Latin admixture or “hybridization” on the Peloponnesus, to offer an interpretation of the crusades as a form of Western colonialism.

Despite being filled with political division and social upheaval, 2020 proved to be an excellent year for publications in the field of Orthodox Christian Studies. One important text rises like cream to the top. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya’s edited volume Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice wrestles with possible solutions to the seemingly ontological problem of women’s ordination.

With the granting of a tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of
Ukraine (OCU) on January 6, 2019, by Patriarch Bartholomew I and the synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the pursuit of a century was finally attained: an authentic local church in Ukraine, truly self-determining and no longer a dependency of another church. Soon after, however, the Moscow Patriarchate halted eucharistic communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and there has been no abating of attacks back and forth since.