LENTEN MEDITATION: FORGIVENESS by Protodeacon Theodore Feldman

1 Comment March 9, 2019 The Editors

This is the second article in our Lenten Meditations 2019 series.

expulsion

Brothers and sisters,

God has forgiven us.

Before the foundation of the world, God knew we would turn our backs on Him, grasp the fruit of knowledge and power, and crucify His Son. And yet God created us. Our very creation is forgiveness. Since the beginning, God has continued to forgive us. At the moment when we stood accursed before him, frightened, ashamed, and about to be driven from Paradise, God sewed skins to clothe us in our need, as a mother comforts her children—having already promised us salvation.

Over all of history He has accepted our sacrifices: “the gifts of Abel, the sacrifices of Noah, the whole burnt offerings of Abraham, the priestly offerings of Moses and Aaron, and the peace-offerings of Samuel”—so we recall at Divine Liturgy during Lent. And finally, He accepts even today our Eucharistic service for the forgiveness of our sins. Read More

HOW PUTIN USES RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY TO GROW HIS EMPIRE by Shane McCrum and Alexis Mrachek

1 Comment March 6, 2019 The Editors

Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow

When Vladimir Putin rose to the presidency of Russia in 2000, he inherited the remains of a once-fearsome communist-atheist imperial state.

In the intervening 19 years, he has transformed Russia back into an imperial power with global ambitions. One of his key tools in that transformation has been the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin often invokes the Russian Orthodox Church in his public speeches, giving the church a much more prominent place in Russian political life than under his predecessors. But these invocations hardly seem sincere in the religious sense. Rather, he has used the church to justify Russian expansion and to try to discredit the West’s influence in Eastern Europe.

Many conservative figures in America, including Pat Buchanan and Franklin Graham, have been attracted to Putin’s rhetoric, with its heavy emphasis on traditional Western-Christian values and its seeming rejection of the culture of “degradation and primitivism,” which Putin says has produced “a moral crisis in the West.” Read More