Bridging the Ecclesial, the Academic, and the Political
On February 7th, 2023, still a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, I boarded a plane and left the Holy Land, where I was serving as a member of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem (REM). Only after landing in Antalya (Turkey) did I publish a post on social media in which I announced my…
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As I pen down these words in my office at the Armenian Theological Seminary of the Holy See of Cilicia, it’s heartrending to acknowledge that over 120,000 Armenian individuals, including children in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) within the South Caucasus, are facing the dire fate of starvation. Unlike many other instances of famine, this crisis has been…
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On May 11th, 2023, Moscow priest John Koval was defrocked by the ecclesiastical court after being suspended by Patriarch Kirill in February of the same year. His offense was replacing the word “victory” with “peace” in the “Prayer for Holy Rus’” mandated by the Patriarchate of Moscow to be included in all litanies. The “offensive”…
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The last year has been a difficult and conflictual one in Ukraine. It seems that war has become a way of life and thinking. It reanimates conflicts, exposes people’s feelings, opens old wounds, provokes intolerance and the search for an enemy, embitters, and most importantly, it makes people believe that there are simple solutions to…
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First of all, let me make my standpoint clear: I am from Ukraine, I am Orthodox, I have experience and interest in peacebuilding, and I co-translated the document For the Life of the World: Towards the Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church (FLOW) into Ukrainian and Russian. I find this document a profound and inspiring…
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There were relatively few people in Moscow who knew Fr. John Koval before February 2023. Native to Luhansk, Ukraine, he moved to Moscow and graduated from the famous Central Music School of the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory. He received theological training at St. Thikhon Orthodox University of Humanities before being ordained some twenty years ago…
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Public Orthodoxy is a publication of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University
