My stomach lurches. The young man in front of me suddenly plunges down the stairwell and seems to be dangling in mid-air three floors up. Then silently - without so much as a grunt - he springs over the banister and is standing next to me again. Evgeny Krynin is one of St Petersburg's most renowned Parkour artists - the urban sport which mixes acrobatics and athletics and is similar to the discipline known as free running. Parkour may have first taken off in France in the 1990s, but Krynin says the true home of this extreme sport, which requires participants to leap, climb and somersault across buildings, is Russia.
Rating: 10|Votes: 1
In the ongoing saga of foreign affairs involving the Republic of Georgia and the Russian Federation, one story has escaped the attention of the news media. It is the story of an Orthodox Christian parish in Toronto, Canada, where Orthodox of all ethnicities, but especially Russian and Georgian, have come together as brothers, as children in the Kingdom of God. It is a joyful unity unnoticed by the outside world, but for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it is a foretaste of the age to come, made possible only in Christ.
On 4 September 2012, in anticipation of his primatial visit to Japan, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia gave an interview to correspondents of Japan’s major mass media:
Rating: 5,5|Votes: 2
It sounds like a scriptwriter's dream. Here we have Russia, a vastly powerful country with a floundering democracy, facing the imminent threat of tyranny. That danger is personified by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who looks like, well, a former KGB man, as imagined by John Le Carré. Standing in his way is a gallant resistance movement symbolized by an all-female rock band, a group of punky young performance artists called Pussy Riot.
“The social and moral responsibility of the Church is heavy, particularly at this time when we, as humans as well as a society, is experiencing a crisis, with a tension never before felt.
