News Reports

Church proposed for site of Beslan school The Orthodox bishop whose jurisdiction includes the town of Beslan in South Ossetia has proposed that a church be built on the site of the school that was attacked by terrorists. At least 330 died in the attack, half of them children. The wounded numbered 727, and more...
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Interweaving Melody

By Joel Klepac The beauty of the icons, the gold-leafed iconostasis, the mesmerizing eternal sounds of the interweaving melodies of five priests with the unseen choir deeply impressed the visitors I took to the Orthodox cathedral in my town in Romania today. The experience was transcendent. The Kingdom we pray for had truly come. The...
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Mother Gavrilia;A Holocaust to His Love

by John Brady The roster of 20th-century saints includes some who lived very public lives, such as Russia's Royal Martyrs, and not a few who strove to live "hid with Christ in God." Saint Silouan of Mount Athos might have passed without a worldly trace if God had not sent Archimandrite Sophrony to record his...
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Bringing it all back home

by Nancy Forest Recently we had a visit from a young Orthodox woman from Pittsburgh who is a doctoral student. She was working on her dissertation, the subject of which is religious conversion stories. She told us that in gathering data for her research, she discovered that one of the most common reactions people have...
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The Gospel of Necessity

by Joe May Matthew 25 House is a house of hospitality in Akron, Ohio, offering transitional housing to homeless men. Many guests have been refugees from Latin America. Joe May founded the house in 2001 after graduating from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. As he wrote in an earlier In Communion, his motivation...
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The View from Below

by Joe May Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell in Nazi Germany: "We have learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled -- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer." Matthew 25 House...
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A Child's Hand…

An injured child's hand clutching a baptismal cross... The photo was taken at Beslan where at least 330 people, mainly children, died after terrorists occupied their school. More than 700 were injured. Though missing the cross, similar photos keep coming from hospitals and mortuaries in Iraq, Chechnya, Darfur, Afghanistan and all the other places where...
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Crisis in Kosovo

Here is a selection of statements on the Kosovo Crisis from Orthodox hierarchs followed by a selection of related news articles. SCOBA Hierarchs Call Upon UN and NATO To Restore Peace and Order in Kosovo http://www.scoba.us/news SCOBA The Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas 8 East 79th Street New York, NY...
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