To speak about sacred space from an Orthodox Christian perspective requires us to first think about how we perceive and understand reality. For many, knowledge of reality is not linked to an actual experience of someone or something. This becomes most acute in the realm of cyberspace and virtual reality where an artificially created environment offers a semblance of experiencing the other.

How might we best articulate architecture’s legitimate ends? And what are its boundaries?
Is this whole world not, after all, fundamentally a world of our own design? Do we not inhabit environments — built and imagined—that are increasingly shaped and controlled, for better or for worse, by our own actions?

Her vocation as a painter had been clear from an early age, but events did not allow her to complete her studies at the art school in her native city. Having withdrawn during the Russian Civil War to Crimea, where her mother and two sisters would die from typhus, she met Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, an encounter that would prove decisive in her orientation toward sacred art.

The liturgy of the Early Christian era was about doing rather than saying. This distinction is borrowed from Dom Gregory Dix by Fr. Kyprian Kern, who was responsible for the first major Orthodox investigation of the sources and practices of the Christian ecclesia.
The Jesuit scholar Marcel Jousse reinforces this assertion in writing of the early Christian practice and understanding of “eating and drinking” the word, rooted in a mimesis of gestures passed on through generations. “Do this in remembrance of me,” says Christ at the last gathering with his disciples (Lk. 22:19).

Last year, I had the honor of being part of the blessing ceremony of the ground on which St. Nicholas National Shrine is currently being built. Very inspiring words were spoken during that ceremony, and it could be sensed that the foundations of this project are being formed of something more than just concrete and steel. Hope, a spirit of renewal, and an aim for reconciliation were bound into the site and materials during that ceremony.

Visitors come to the magnificent Klosterneuburg Monastery outside Vienna—which recently celebrated its 900th anniversary—for many reasons: to celebrate the foundation of the Austrian state (which more or less began here), to pray in the imposing Baroque church, to tour the ornate imperial residence built around it as a kind of Escorial, to see the crown of the Archdukes of Austria, to venerate the relics of the monastery’s founder, St. Leopold of Babenberg, and to contemplate the world-famous masterpiece of medieval art housed here—the gold and enamel reredos made in 1181 by Nicholas of Verdun.

The Age of the Crusades is by far one of the most popular subjects in the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue (or rather, in the ongoing Orthodox-Catholic polemics), a time period which constantly arises in the field of historical as well as theological deliberation.