Author: Seraphim Danckaert

Seraphim Danckaert is Headmaster of St. Peter’s Classical School in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is co-editor of On the Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement (Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2016). Some of his other articles are available on Academia.edu.

Two Surprising Statistics about Orthodox Christianity in America

· Seraphim Danckaert
Plenty has been written about the Pew Research Center’s second Religious Landscape Study, published in 2014. Relatively little commentary has focused on what the findings tell us about Orthodox Christians in America. In part, the lack of attention is due to the very small sample size of Orthodox believers in the study — so small that the margin for error is somewhere…

Two Schools: What the Council of Crete Means for the Future of Orthodox Theology

· Seraphim Danckaert
Various media reports and editorials have described the controversies before, during, and after the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, recently held during Pentecost on the island of Crete. Some have concluded that the Council’s difficulties were the result of geopolitics, and can therefore be explained away as little more than an ecclesial version of the larger political and cultural…

A New Ecclesiology for the Orthodox Church?

· Seraphim Danckaert
Orthodox Christians often find themselves answering the following question: why is Orthodoxy divided along ethnic lines into different churches? At least officially, the answer to that question has been quite clear: we are not divided; we are one Church, united in faith and worship, with an administrative structure that organizes itself along local lines, in accordance with the ancient traditions and canon…

Losing our Religion: On “Retaining” Young People in the Orthodox Church

· Seraphim Danckaert
A recent article on the challenge of interfaith marriage in Greek Orthodoxy has been circulating widely on Facebook.[1] One reason for the article’s popularity is its startling claim that 90% of Americans with Greek roots are no longer in communion with the Orthodox Church. Similarly dismal statistics are likely true for most Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States, but the article in…