Rating: 10|Votes: 4
So I stood there awkwardly, no young people near, I couldn’t understand the services, in fact I didn’t even speak very good Russian at the time… But then during the services something in my soul changed. It was just one incident, but it turned everything upside down in me.
Elissa Bjeletich
Religion, and religious people, have a responsibility to offer a living faith, a true witness to the real God — not a flat, false witness. Perhaps that failure of religious people, of us, is what is killing religion. If we witness to a cold God who sits in the sky oblivious to human suffering, then we’re the ones who put that image in their heads — and that’s why when the bombs go off and the carnage is everywhere, they say that they don’t really need God. It’s not God they’re rejecting; it’s our false, useless witness of God.
Met. Germanos of Eleia
Met. Germanos of Eleia, the representative of the Church of Greece to the meetings of First Hierarchs in Geneva, where the final decisions were made about the texts and order of the Great and Holy Synod, delivered his report to the Hierarchy of the Church 10 days ago. In his report he addresses the problems with the much-disliked text "Relations of the Orthodox Church with the rest of the Christian World."
Nikita Filatov, Archpriest Dimitry Kioroglo
Rating: 6.6|Votes: 10
Gagauzia [pronounced Ga-ga-ooz-i-a], a tiny nation within Moldova, was formerly nicknamed “the guard unit of the Byzantine Empire”; this nation preserved its faith under the Ottoman yoke, although they are ethnic Turks. Our talk with Archpriest Dimitry Kioroglo from the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia (Moldova) is devoted to the origins of such steadfastness and the spiritual roots of the Gagauz people, their history and traditions, and their choice.
John Sanidopoulos, Elder Ephraim of Arizona
Rating: 6.5|Votes: 21
I want to say that without people of the Old Calendar knowing, although it is the Orthodox and most correct calendar and most blessed, however, because over time people were not catechized well in things and the truth, when they were returning to the Old Calendar because they said the calendar should be kept with exactitude, and as a rebuke to the Church of Greece, they arrived at the point where they made it a dogmatic and ecclesiastical offense. So when they heard it was a dogmatic error in the Church, they shrunk back and began to look at the matter differently. But it is not a dogmatic issue, but an ecclesiastical matter that simply deals with the calendar.