Bridging the Ecclesial, the Academic, and the Political
A recent announcement out of the Metropolis of Boston possibly remains under the radar for most but arguably constitutes a monumental and momentous evolution in pastoral sensibility, canonical susceptibility, and church practice. According to the announcement, a divorced clergyman received approval to remarry and continue serving in his parish. The decision of the Holy and…
Continue reading
Some time ago, in March 2025, the Georgian Apostolic Orthodox Church in North America (GAOCNA) imposed disciplinary action on three members of its monastic clergy (two abbots and an abbess) in Maryland and Oklahoma. This should hardly have come as a shock, because the Georgian Church—both the national church in America and its ancient patriarchate…
Continue reading
Is it any wonder that institutional religion is perpetually questioned, especially in a church where the very definition of leadership is largely misinformed and misplaced? In our otherwise theologically convoluted understanding of sacred hierarchy and holy orders, we have sadly diminished the concepts of ordination and organization to the point where titles of church leaders…
Continue reading
I happened to be in Sweden when the country joined NATO two months ago. On March 6, an American nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bomber overflew the capital region in a show of solidarity with the newest alliance member. On the ground below, in the Stockholm suburbs, I was beginning my field work with Orthodox Christians to…
Continue reading
In the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC), elections are taking place: in the coming months the metropolitan of one of the largest seaside dioceses, Sliven, and then the Bulgarian patriarch, will be elected. Of course, the election of a diocesan bishop cannot be called a unique event in the life of the BOC, but this time…
Continue reading
Lena Zezulin addresses the bishops of ROCOR on support for the Moscow Patriarchate two years into Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Continue reading
Editor’s Note: The Orthodox Church in Russia is divided, but this division is not canonical nor administrative. Moreover, it is not always visible from the outside. While the official Church has become an integral part of Putin’s political regime, on a deeper level, there is resistance on behalf of small Orthodox communities and individuals who…
Continue reading
Until 2023, before I left the Russian Orthodox Church, I was a priest of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem. Thus, I have spent four years in Israel, and on the one hand, and I’m familiar with the context, but on the other I cannot be impartial, still feeling anxious about my friends there. Assessing…
Continue reading
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…
Continue reading
“Church reform” has always been a taboo in the Orthodox Church; it has a negative connotation in some traditionalistic circles. Actually, there are many elements that strengthen stagnation and promote anti-reform tendencies, such as the claim of unity, stability, identity, psychological and spiritual factors, catholicity and universality, synodality, solidarity and collegiality, sameness, traditionalism, and others….
Continue reading
Read part one of this two-part essay In 2020, Orthodox Church in America (OCA) Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) of Dallas and the South warned his flock in a diocesan letter about the teachings of Fr. Peter Heers, which His Grace noted were “sanctioned by no canonical jurisdiction.” While the focus on Heers’s canonical status has demanded…
Continue reading
Between the years 850 and 859, something unexpected happened in Córdoba. Some forty-eight Christians were martyred. Contemporary church historians usually refer to them as “voluntary martyrs” because almost all of them, by their own will, presented themselves in front of the Muslim authorities and confessed themselves to be Christians, denouncing Islam and Mohammed as a…
Continue reading
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”…
Continue reading
The spirit of Christian freedom is a gift that in post-Soviet Orthodoxy has not, alas, been embraced or appreciated by many. Soviet-educated people, deprived of their experience of inner freedom, mostly failed to discover Orthodoxy as a liberating experience. Rather the opposite, immersion in church life became a convenient substitute for Soviet ideology. The path…
Continue reading
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…
Continue reading
It can be difficult to fathom the mindset of the followers of Jesus in the early to mid fourth century, as they gradually abandoned their commitment to the Way of total love towards all, even enemies. Before being called Christians, the disciples of Jesus were known as the people of the Way. What Way? The Way that…
Continue reading
As I write this, the drama surrounding the expulsion of the monks of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onuphry from the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra is being played out, a drama simultaneously sad, understandable, and scandalous. I first visited the Lavra in November of 1988. A portion of the monastery had just been re-opened, and it…
Continue reading
March is Women’s History Month, when we particularly witness women’s vital roles in our past, including in the Orthodox Church. These stories deserve our attention and appreciation, but let’s not just look to the past, let’s also look to the future. Let’s make history. Let’s make history by ordaining women as deaconesses in the Orthodox…
Continue reading
I arrived in Volos a day early so my family could get settled into our Airbnb and immediately felt a certain hesitation about the days ahead. As a priest of the Orthodox Church in America pastoring and preaching in a parochial, domesticated way for 30+ years, I am used to depending on easily accessible basic…
Continue reading
On February 16, the second face-to-face meeting of initiative groups of clergy and laity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was held in Sophia National Sanctuary Complex in Kyiv. Its final appeal we published on Public Orthodox earlier. Now we follow up with the impressions and comments of…
Continue reading
No official dialogue has thus far been established between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (under the Moscow Patriarchate’s jurisdiction until May 2022) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (which received autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019), yet this is not an insurmountable obstacle to the informal dialogue on the grassroots level. Active priests and lay…
Continue reading
Your Eminences! My letter is addressed to the Orthodox bishops in Russia. I have intentionally not collected signatures or involved any Church structures or public organizations, because I am addressing not the episcopal body, not the leaders of the Moscow Patriarchy, but each of you personally. My letter’s addressee is an Orthodox Christian who…
Continue reading
From the moment the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was granted autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarch early in 2019, it has competed with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) not only over canonicity but also about the number of parishes and the number of faithful. Each claims to be the only canonical church in the country,…
Continue reading
We Orthodox need to ask ourselves some hard questions about the episcopal ethos that has come down to us from Byzantium and was then magnified in the Russian tradition. This was an aspect of Orthodoxy that for his entire life troubled Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944), one of the most prolific Orthodox thinkers of the 20th…
Continue reading
This spring, the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) sealed significant and important deals, which has solidified and strengthened the SOC’s position. The first “deal” in May turned the Macedonian Orthodox Church (MOC), formally the Ohrid Archbishopric, into a canonical church, which ended around 50 years of estrangement between the SOC and MOC. The second one in…
Continue reading
“Meeting him I sensed immediately a quality of authenticity,of integrity, of completeness; here I felt was a true man.He was marked by a serenity, by a transparent and luminous joy”(Kallistos Ware, “Mount Athos Today” [1976]) A Moment of Pan-Orthodox Unity In a time when the Orthodox Christian world is broken by schism—the schism over…
Continue reading
Bishops are regularly in the news for exercising their authority and then either coming under fire or being praised for doing so. Over the last couple months we’ve seen volcanic reactions for and against Archbishop Elpidophoros presiding at the baptism of a gay couple’s children in Greece. When the bishops of the Orthodox Church in…
Continue reading
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18) In our inaugural editorial in 2015, we stated: “The Wheel is a journal for the intelligent and constructive articulation of the Christian Gospel…
Continue reading
War changes many things, primarily people’s minds, but also the usual flow of time. What takes years or even decades in peacetime takes a few months, or sometimes even days, during war. On May 27, the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the highest governing body of the church, after much debate, expressed its…
Continue reading
“…For there must be also heresies/divisions among you, that they which are approved/tested-and-proved-reliable may be made manifest among you.” (1 Cor 11: 19) In this “Time of Troubles” of the Orthodox Church, many Orthodox Christians, particularly those in the Moscow Patriarchate, are contemplating either changing “jurisdictions” or taking a time out from the whole church…
Continue reading
You must be logged in to post a comment.