Approximately thirty priests and laypeople gathered at Kyiv’s Open Orthodox University of Saint Sophia-Wisdom last week to discuss the future of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. They produced this declaration of their hope for reconciliation and cooperation among all Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdictions. 

Metropolitan Onufriy (L), primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, and Patriarch Filaret (R), primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate. July 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

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Statement of the Initiative Group of the Open Orthodox Network
Kyiv, August 23, 2018

Gathered together by the initiative of the Open Orthodox University of Saint Sophia-Wisdom, we, the clergy and faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, began a dialogue on the future of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and its place in society.

The majority of us are determined and consistent supporters of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. We are open to dialogue and call upon Orthodox Ukrainians who belong or will belong to different Orthodox jurisdictions, to refrain from the language of hostility and violence to anyone in solving any issues, including matters of administration and property.

We propose peaceful coexistence, cooperation, and concelebration instead of war between jurisdictions. Read More

The following is excerpted from a report released yesterday by the Associated Press. Well-known priest and scholar, Archimandrite Cyril (Hovorun), served as one of the sources. The original contains a screen shot of a Russian phishing attempt on Father John Jillions, chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). We strongly urge you to read the report in its entirety at the link provided below.

“Byzantine Symphonia” in 21st-century Russia: Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin

Nothing Sacred: Russian Spies Tried Hacking Orthodox Clergy

by

Raphael Satter

The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor last month have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world’s most senior Orthodox Christian figures, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine.

The targets included top aides to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who often is described as the first among equals of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Christian leaders.

The Istanbul-based patriarch is currently mulling whether to accept a Ukrainian bid to tear that country’s church from its association with Russia, a potential split fueled by the armed conflict between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The AP’s evidence comes from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied last year by Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. Read More

Late last week I was cleaning out my office at Peterborough Reintegration Services (PRS) when I found a crucifix that I hadn’t seen in some time. PRS is a restorative justice-based not-for-profit in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, which works with federal offenders making the transition from prison to the community. Having worked with PRS for nearly ten years, I have served for the last three as the organization’s Executive Director. PRS has two main programs: Haley House, a 10-bed community residential facility for offenders with healthcare issues or at end of life; and Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA), a program focused on making communities safer through work with high risk sex offenders released from prison.

As part of the work at Haley House, PRS staff often organize and attend the memorials for clients who pass away while receiving support from the organization. One client, Craig*, had come to us with late stage lung cancer in 2009. Receiving his cancer diagnosis while living at Canada’s now closed Kingston Penitentiary, PRS was asked to support him because of our unique ability to meet his healthcare needs as well as manage the risk he posed to the community as a sexual offender through the CoSA program. While receiving superior care in the community, Craig’s cancer went into remission after his release from prison. However, by late 2010 he was given a terminal diagnosis and passed away in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The crucifix I came across last week had adorned Craig’s casket and, as I was the only Catholic in an organization with evangelical roots, after Craig’s funeral the priest asked me if I wanted to keep it.

Craig was one of more than ten children born to a Canadian Irish Catholic family in a small town. When his father died tragically, Craig and some of his brothers and sisters were sent to live in an infamous Canadian orphanage that was operated by a Roman Catholic religious order. There Craig and his brothers were brutally sexually assaulted countless times throughout their childhood and youth. One of his brothers died while at the orphanage. Read More

The connection between dreams and desire is something that is accepted in today’s post-Freudian world. However, for Byzantine Christians to come to terms with illicit dream images, without the benefit of a theory of the unconscious, was a different matter entirely.

Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium (Volume 24 in Brill’s Byzantina Australiensia series) grew out of papers offered at the 19^th Biennial Conference of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, on February 24-26, 2017, at Monash University Law Chambers in Melbourne. Selected and revised conference papers have been supplemented by others to cover the volume’s three-fold theme. Our contributors come from the United States, Israel, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, and our sources stretch from Byzantine Greek and Latin to Hebrew, Arabic, and Armenian.

Overview of the Volume

Monastic writings from Egypt, Gaza, and Sinai indicate the practical challenges that dreams posed to Eastern monks in their attempts to implement ideals of purity in their ascetic regimen. The Eastern tradition of Evagrius of Pontus was mediated to the West by John Cassian of Marseilles, among others. Although the classical background to the notion of “yearning for the divine” in Cassian and other writers of the Western Christian tradition has attracted an impressive amount of scholarship, the oneirological theories of ancient philosophers and their influence on Byzantine thought have been given considerably less attention. This is the subject of Part 1 of the book. Read More