by Phil Silouan Thompson I read on from the earliest Fathers into the third and fourth centuries — Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil. Where was the break I was expecting? Where was the change from congregational democracy and unstructured charismatic worship, to liturgical, hierarchical religion? That change was nowhere to be found; instead, it looked more like […]
My Great Adventure in Search of the Truth
From Sister Matthaia Osswald This story tells how a Roman Catholic nun discovered the fullness of the Truth in the Orthodox Church… Childhood and adolescence. I was born in 1961 from Protestant parents, in a town in South Germany. We lived in a suburb which had earlier been a separate village and later was integrated […]
Moving East: Part One
by Philip Silouan Thompson Phil Thompson is the author of the Silouan blog, an excellent site for information. He is also a well known iconographer in North American Orthodoxy, and this, his story, was taken from his own website. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the […]
Protestants Adopt Orthodoxy
A Group of Protestants Will Adopt Orthodoxy on the day of Holy Saturday 2 April 2010, Interfax – A group of former Protestants will be baptized on the eve of Easter in St. Andrew Church of Kaliningrad, Russia. Young men and women started visiting an Orthodox church several months ago. In the past, they had […]
The Personal Story of Fr. George Johnson
by Fr. George Johnson I am a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, serving in the cathedral of St John the Baptist in Washington, D.C. There are some almost uncanny parallels between our lives, even down to the grumpy choir directors. I was (and sometimes still am) the grumpy choir director, however. I […]