Archpriest Andrei Tkachev answers questions for a Serbian TV channel. This is an interview from January 5, 2022, before Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, which began February 24. Fr. Andrei Tkachev is from Lvov in western Ukraine, and was serving as the priest of a church in Kiev during the […]

You cannot attend an Orthodox service and not be aware of doors. There are the doors that form the center of the icon screen, opening directly upon the altar. There are the two doors that flank them, one on either side, known as the “Deacon Doors.” Someone always seems to […]

At the recent March for Life in Washington, D.C. one person gave a speech.  In it he said, “We affirm the gift and sanctity of life—all life, born and unborn.  As Christians we confess that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God.  Every life is […]

If I have done modernity a disservice, it might be in giving the impression that its temptations might be something new. In truth, there is nothing particularly new in the philosophy of modernity other than its peculiar assembly of old ideas and the capture of the general culture as its […]

I have just finished reading a very important and immensely depressing book about the autocephaly of the OCA entitled, The Time Has Come: Debates over the OCA Autocephaly Reflected in St. Vladimir’s Quarterly. It is an important book because it offers so many insights about the OCA’s autocephaly and church […]

Greek Mythology made the curiosity of Pandora the primary cause of suffering in the world. She fails to resist the lure of finding out what is in a box she is told to leave closed. Opening the box, she unleashes sorrow and suffering into the world. We humans are a […]

I begin with a quote from an article that is almost 60 years old, but which has lost none of its timeliness:   “Since the Byzantine era, Orthodoxy was always brought to and accepted by whole nations.  The only familiar pattern of the past, therefore, is not the creation of mere […]

The Great Prokeimenon, sometimes chanted at Vespers in the Orthodox liturgical tradition, asks the rhetorical question, “Who is so great a God as our God?” I often think that by “great” one might also mean “gutsy”. The gods of other nations and religions are comparatively tame and timid when set […]

Forgiveness is so terribly hard. On a psychological level, it feels dangerous. The shame engendered by any insult or injury is our experience of vulnerability, and we instinctively react to protect ourselves. That, we must understand, is not a sin, it is an instinct that is a gift from God. […]

This Christmas was the last Christmas – ever. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. Wherever He is, there is the beginning and the end of all things. If Christ is truly present in this year’s Christmas, then it is the last Christmas – and […]

The soldiers were scattered across Europe with the loneliness of war. The world was caught up in a total struggle. Women had gone to the factories; children were collecting scrap metal. The “war effort” was universal. In many places, food was rationed. The madhouse of consumption belonged only to the […]

Second Temple Judaism was a many-splendoured thing.  That is, it included many different elements—so many elements in fact that some people talk not just of Judaism, but Judaisms (in the plural). While the use of the plural might be a bit of a stretch, there is no denying that Second […]