The whole earth is the living icon of the face of God.

(St. John of Damascus)

For nine months now, I’ve been making a film about the Orthodox Church and climate change. I have seventy hours of interviews with hierarchs, clergy, monks, lay leaders, and scientists in the can so far, and I have hundreds of hours of beautiful, impactful, and current footage of landscapes, churches, wildlife, and areas being affected now by climate change. The film has taken me to every corner of the natural and Orthodox world in North America, starting with remote Alaska, but also including many cities like New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. In truth, this whole crazy endeavour seems like an impossibility to me. I have no idea how we got this much and this far already—probably a combination of the Church’s prayers and our guardian angels working overtime. I don’t think something like this has been done before in modern Orthodox history. I have mad respect for the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration (OFT), and its advisory committee, for having the vision, and patience, to produce such an endeavour. In all honesty, however, the scope of their vision, which has been guiding the making of this film, is simply what the times we are living in call for anyway. We have entered the bare-knuckle round in an unfolding worldwide climate crisis, the magnitude of which is only now coming into focus. Read More

APRIL 2019

Male and Female He Created Them? Raising an Intersex Child

Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy

On Mental Health Referrals by Orthodox Clergy

A New Political Theology for 21st-Century Ukrainian Orthodoxy

Blessed and Most Holy Pascha Read More

Lamentation

Exultation

Catechetical Homily of Our Father among the Saints, John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople Read More

St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv. Seat of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Ukraine comprises a majoritarian Orthodox Christian nation where more than half of the population regards the recent creation of the autocephalous Orthodox Church favourably. In this light, it defies the imagination that Ukrainians should deliver virtually three-quarters of their vote to a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from a party named after his television show and having no political experience and no discernible policy platform—over against an Orthodox incumbent whose central role in securing the Church’s independence from Russian control was abundantly chronicled in photo op after photo op, from the Phanar to Kyiv and beyond. Orthodox observers in the West who support both Ukrainian statehood and autocephaly, but who cringed when the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s exarchs christened Mr. Poroshenko “the new St. Volodymyr,” must feel their embarrassment all the more acutely after the president’s humiliating electoral defeat. They might also feel a tinge of schadenfreude over his failed appropriation of the Church as an electioneering prop. (I covered some of these concerns previously here.)

This is not to suggest that Mr. Zelensky represented the better of the two seriously flawed candidates who made it to the runoff. We can have little idea of what to expect in general from a Zelensky presidency, and in particular from his dealings with the two Orthodox entities competing on Ukrainian soil—the autocephalous Ukrainian Church and the Russian Church, the latter widely viewed as the Kremlin’s bedfellow. Read More