Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reopened an iconic Byzantine church in Istanbul as a mosque on Monday, four years after his government had designated it an Islamic house of worship. Despite criticism from Christians around the world, Turkey formally converted Chora Church into a mosque after it had turned Istanbul’s landmark Hagia Sophia into a Muslim prayer space.
Read MoreNow is a good time as any to look ahead to what this year will bring. For Orthodox Christians, it means marking down the top Orthodox events of 2024. In fact, the next 12 months promise to be eventful ones — from academic conferences to film festivals to summer retreats and international gatherings.
Read MoreThe ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, a major calendar change and the deepening rift between Constantinople and Moscow defined 2023 for the Orthodox church around the world. Here’s a look back at the biggest stories of the year.
Read MoreOctober is Orthodox Awareness Month. Orthodox Christian Fellowship, a leading Eastern Orthodox student organization, dedicated the month to raise awareness of OCF in the Orthodox community and among non-Orthodox students on college campuses nationwide.
Read More(REVIEW) Watching documentary films is never easy. Oftentimes, documentaries can be both intellectually challenging and culturally enriching — especially if they are about the church and faith. The majority of Orthodox Christian documentaries are produced in non-English speaking countries such as Russia, Greece and Serbia. With the growth of the Orthodox church around the globe, English-speaking countries are slowly catching up.
Read More(OPINION) After the Christmas season and before Lent, Orthodox priests have — for centuries — rushed to visit church members’ homes to bless them with prayers and splashes of holy water flung about with a foot-long brush or handfuls of basil.
Read MoreRod Dreher, a senior editor and blogger at The American Conservative and a convert to Orthodox Christianity from Catholicism is one of the most influential voices in the conservative movement who has moved further right in recent years and argued for Americans to look to nationalist examples in Europe, like Victor Orban’s Hungary, for solutions.
Read More(OPINION) It isn’t every day that one of the creators of a political thriller gets to ask its real-life protagonist to evaluate the novel’s plot. But that happened when the late Billy Wireman, president of Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, handed the last Soviet Union leader a copy of “The Secret Diary of Mikhail Gorbachev.”
Read MoreOrthodox Christians in North America and around the world already are venerating the Alaskan matriarch for her care and concern for abused women.
Read MoreSeveral young Orthodox converts who live at the St. James House, a self-directed program for young Orthodox adults, kept asking me during my visit last November if I had met Joe, the beekeeper. From what I had gathered, this guy named Joseph “Joe” Dunham, 68, was a living legend of the Eagle River community. He sounded quirky. I had to meet him.
Read More(ANALYSIS) At around the same time a Russian Orthodox anti-war statement was distributed to collect nearly 300 signatures, several of Ukraine’s evangelical theological educators expressed to Russian evangelical leaders deep disappointment over their failure to speak out against Russia’s unprovoked attack. Some Russian evangelicals have issued their own anti-war statements.
Read More(OPINION) Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church has defended Russia’s actions and blamed the conflict on the West.
Read MoreIn the last couple years, Ukraine has been in the center of the Orthodox schism between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate over independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Many Orthodox theologians argue that the war in Ukraine will determine the future of the OCU. Cyril Hovorun is one of them.
Read More(OPINION) As Russia amasses troops on the Ukrainian border in preparation for a potential invasion, tensions between the two countries are also playing out through a conflict in the Orthodox Church.
Read MorePlant-based products have unleashed a meaty debate in church pews and on message boards over whether products like the Impossible Burger can or can’t be eaten during Lent and if doing so is ultimately a sin.
Read MoreHundreds of thousands of believers in the tiny Balkan country have been protesting a new law that would allow the government to take possession of property from the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Read MoreOne of Christianity and Judaism’s holiest sites was seeded with more than 6,500 landmines and booby traps inside churches by the Israeli military beginning in 1968.
Read MoreCrowds of Romanians gathered on the coast of the Black Sea to watch priests bless holy water and throw three crosses into the water, representing God in the trinity of father, son and holy spirit. Then the race in near-freezing water began to retrieve a cross, believed to bring its owner blessings in the new year.
Read MoreFor a man who has encountered hardship from his youth in Greece to dealing with the loss of his wife in 2012, Papadakis says the craft of carving is more than just a job or hobby. It relates to his own Orthodox Christian faith. “I love my God,” he says in between taps on a gouge. “I have to do something best. If I give something, it needs to be as godly as God is. It has to be worthy.”
Read MoreThousands of Eastern Orthodox pilgrims crowded in Jerusalem's Old City on Saturday for the Easter ceremony at Jesus’ burial and resurrection site. Some believe a flame miraculously comes from heaven into Jesus’ tomb.
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