The most poignant echo of the death of the Byazantine Empire in the current crisis is the role that Westerners will prove to have played in the destruction of the Eastern Christian communities, should it come to pass.
Maria Degtyarova, Natalia Degtyarova
Rating: 10|Votes: 7
It is hard to imagine now how it could have been then. In the protocol of the interrogation of one witness in the case of a priest is written: “There is information that all the clergy in Perm have been arrested and there are no [church] services anywhere…” In 2012 the legal “statute of limitations” of 75 years ran out, and researchers were given access to the investigation archives from 1937, including those of the Perm state archives of recent history. There was a year of familiarization with the archives: searches, systematization and processing of materials, making contact with the fate of people swept away by the wave of the “Great Terror”.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Rating: 10|Votes: 12
If we take a human lifetime as the Biblical threescore years and ten, only fourteen lifetimes ago the English Church was an integral part of the Orthodox family, belonging to the Universal Church of Christ. For nearly five centuries the English were in communion with the rest of Christendom. There were close contacts with Eastern Christendom. One of England's sainted Archbishops, Theodore of Tarsus, was a Greek; Greek monks and a bishop lived in England at the end of the 10th century, and Gytha, the daughter of the Old English King, Harold II, married in Kiev. It is clear that during such a long period, a half-millennium, the Christian faith impregnated the way of life of the people and the Old English monarchy. It is clear that traces of the Faith of the first five centuries of English Christianity, a Faith that was Orthodox though not Byzantine, must have remained after the 11th century.
Vincent Martini
Rating: 5.6|Votes: 29
Many evangelical groups today are proposing that we abandon “traditional” models of “being the Church,” and instead replace that stodginess with what is presumably a more “New Testament” model: that of the “house church” or “cell church.” Essentially, they are promoting that the local Church be a de-centralized assembly, meeting in the homes of various individuals, proportionally scattered throughout a city. The presumption is that this is the “Biblical” model for both fellowship and discipleship, being derived from the New Testament itself.
Rating: 9|Votes: 1
Christmas is the holiday most celebrated by Christians around the world. For most Americans, Christmas now is behind us—but millions of adherents, especially Orthodox Christians, will keep celebrating into January. From its birth in the Middle East, Christianity has circled the globe.
