Editor’s Note: This article is part of an October 2017 series of posts on the Reformation and Protestantism written by O&H authors and guest writers marking the 500th anniversary of the nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Articles are written by Orthodox Christians and discuss not just the Reformation as a historical…
The Orthodox Church in the United States has problems. One of the problems the Orthodox Church currently suffers in this country is a lack of converts. There are other problems as well: overlapping jurisdictions, lack of communication across jurisdictional lines, and a tendency to isolate ourselves from communities in which we live. But it is our lack of converts that strikes me…
ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY VOLUME IV: THE WORSHIP AND LITURGICAL LIFE OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH. By Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev. Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016. 382 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-88141-522-0. In this fourth volume of his encyclopedic work Orthodox Christianity, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokolamsk has provided especially for us Orthodox Christians in America what just may be the most readable, comprehensive, and informative book on…
Editor’s Note: The following is a review of The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church, published April 2017 by St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, Florence, Arizona. It was sent to us by Dr. Paul Ladouceur originally as four separate posts, but we have combined them here into one, since they are closely related and also since…
Editor’s Note: A couple of weeks back, a reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune contacted us on the O&H Facebook page to get in touch with former Mormons (LDS) who had converted to Orthodoxy. One of those who responded to this inquiry was Cameron Davis. He was one of several interviewed for this piece (which is well worth reading). Like all newspaper…
It is a recurring popular trope, especially in some Protestant circles, to dismiss the Church Fathers on the grounds that they were “seduced” or “corrupted” by Greek philosophy and that their understanding of the faith displays the cultural milieu of the day, rather than proper biblical exegesis. Even many scholars have claimed that attempting to read the Bible as the Fathers did…
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…
Public Orthodoxy’s recent post by Giacomo Sanfilippo on “Conjugal Friendship” claimed to take a postmodern approach to sacramental conjugality in Orthodox Christianity, but ended up falling into ethnophyletic and gnostic heresies from an Orthodox standpoint.
On April 2, 2017, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option debuted at number seven for hardcover non-fiction on the New York Times’ bestseller list (promptly to drop from the list the following week). This new offering from Dreher is a summary of his life experience, a sort of manifesto for the conservative Christian seeking meaning in a world inundated by progressive agendas, commercialism,…
Writing in Evangelical flagship publication Christianity Today, Ed Stetzer, who is a professor at Wheaton and heads up the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism, made some guesses about why Evangelicals become Orthodox Christians in “Hank Hanegraaff’s Switch to Eastern Orthodoxy, Why People Make Such Changes, and Four Ways Evangelicals Might Respond“: The obvious question is what draws evangelicals to more liturgical traditions—and…