Introducing a new book release by Ancient Faith Publishing, set for availability in November 2021: Syria Crucified: Stories of Modern Martyrdom in an Ancient Christian Land is written by Orthodox Christian authors Zachary Wingerd and Brad Hoff, and importantly is the first ever book to detail the plight of Syria’s Christians during the past ten years of tragic war.
Lolita Naranovich
I have always dreamed of proving to everyone that disabled people can also be helpful.
Russian Orthodox clergy conducted the elaborate ceremony, watched by hundreds of guests who included the groom's mother, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia - the self-proclaimed heir to Russia's imperial throne - and more than a dozen minor European royals.
Kyrylo Myazha
The spiritual situation for an Eastern Orthodox Christian immigrating from the Western world to Orthodox Georgia is one of the best within the Post-Soviet countries.
Pedro Faidiga Passos, a Brazilian who converted to Orthodoxy and settled in Romania, says that God “fished him” through his Romanian wife and thus revealed to him “the full beauty of the Christian faith.” He said he finds a lot of peace in Romania.
Elder Epiphanios (Theodoropoulos)
If it’s impermissible to denigrate the mission and work of clergy serving in the world (as well as of the zealots and bearers of gifts of grace from among the laity), it’s also impermissible to denigrate the mission and work of monks. The Church is led unerringly by the Holy Spirit.
Natalia Shatova
There are more than forty active Orthodox churches, and their parishioners aren’t simply Slavs who have moved to Japan, as you might first think. The parishioners of the country’s main Orthodox church—the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Tokyo—are mainly Japanese. St. Nicholas of Japan was the first to bring Orthodoxy to the Japanese land.
Maria Saradzhishvili
Traces of the fire remained on the church floor for a long time, and all the victims were canonized as the Kvatakhevo Martyrs in the eighteenth century. Since then, no woman has set foot in Kvatakhevo. Only men are allowed to enter, to avoid desecrating the memory of innocently murdered nuns.
Elena Nasledysheva
Seeing Sinai with your own eyes means seeing and feeling something that will be remembered for a lifetime. And if you manage to take photographs, your memories will be clearer, brighter and deeper. Our family archive contains photographs of Sinai—mine and those that my daughter took when she and her husband climbed the holy mountain of Moses.
In books and online forums, you can find many testimonies of miracles that occurred with pilgrims to Diveyevo. But can it be that St. Seraphim helps only guests, forgetting about the locals? Of course not! We asked Diveyevo residents to recall miracles that happened to them by the prayers of St. Seraphim and to share stories they’ve heard.
With an art school and international animation festival, a Georgian Orthodox bishop is trying to revive a village on the de facto border with South Ossetia.
Sergei Sinelnik
To believe in people, you should set out on a long journey. That’s when you realize that not all is lost, because we still have so many caring and good people. You rejoice if once in a while you get to meet such “pearls.”
The journey to return Sophia to her remote island birthplace took about four years, starting with researching tribal and family history, and culminating this summer with Sophia’s return to the cemetery of the Russian Orthodox church where she was baptized.
Dmitry Lapa
If asked who is the most mysterious early English saint, lovers of Anglo-Saxon holiness may well name St. Ragener, who was greatly venerated in Northampton, the county town of Northamptonshire. This holy soldier and martyr for Christ would have remained in obscurity but for a series of visions and miracles which occurred three centuries after his death.
Pilgrimages to St. Osburga’s shrine continued throughout the Middle Ages, and in 1410, following petitions of the laity and clergy of Coventry, an official feast in honor of this saint was established. Her reliquary stood in the south transept of the post-Conquest monastery church of Coventry. Her relics were translated in 1482 within the monastery. Her splendid shrine with relics, along with her head enclosed in copper and gold, was destroyed during the sixteenth-century Reformation, and the monastery dissolved.
Moving to Georgia has been hugely helpful for my Orthodox faith, as being a devout Orthodox Christian within Georgia is looked upon positively, especially for an individual like myself who converted to the faith as an adult. In addition to this, there are numerous holy sites, churches, and monasteries I can visit throughout Georgia.
Djukanovic called on the Serbian Orthodox Church to give up plans to inaugurate its new head in the Adriatic country at a monastery in the former capital Cetinje.
Archpriest Eugene Grushetsky
Then Darwin said that a new species could appear in a million years. But his statement was an intellectual exercise, a mere extrapolation and guesswork. In his youth he studied theology at Cambridge to become a clergyman; and he certainly read the Bible, which correctly describes the creation of the world in the right order: light, plants, fish, birds, mammals and man. The prophet Moses described all this in in the book of Genesis around the thirteenth century B.C., and thirty-two centuries before Darwin! So Darwin learned all this in the Bible—and then began to explain that everything had evolved by itself.
Olga Rozhneva, Archpriest Paul Volmensky
A few years later, the Japanese reached Shanghai. In July 1937, after a brutal artillery preparation and aerial bombardment, Japan, which had long had an eye on China’s raw materials, landed its troops in the vicinity of the city. The Chinese army was unable to withstand the Japanese, and Shanghai was invaded.
Archpriest Paul Volmensky’s great-grandmother, grandfather and grandmother of were born in the imperial Russia, came to America from China, having made the difficult journey of refugees: Harbin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, England, Rhodesia, Tubabao and San Francisco. During our meeting Fr. Pavel recalled their lives, wanderings and amazing adventures.
