Source: Orthodox Church in America SPRINGFIELD, VA [OCA] The Orthodox Convert Survey, sponsored and managed by the Parish Development Forum, will close to respondents on May 29. The survey can be accessed from this link. “The survey is open to any person who decided to embrace the Orthodox faith as an adult, regardless of the parish, diocese, or Orthodox jurisdiction. Their ‘conversion decision’ could have been recent or decades ago.” said Joseph Kormos, Forum lay co-chair of the Forum and Parish Development Ministry Leader for the Archdiocese of Western Pennsylvania. “Objectives of the survey are to understand, in their own words, the motivations and…
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Source: The Wall Street Journal Ancient faith is drawing converts with no ties to its historic lands By Francis X. Rocca | Photographs by Alyssa Pointer for The Wall Street Journal Michelle Jimenez was captaining an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico in early 2020 when she heard about a Bible-study group organized by a crew member. Though she had been baptized a Catholic in infancy, she was never raised in that or any other faith. She had experimented with New Age beliefs and Zen Buddhist meditation, but hadn’t found a spiritual home. Her new encounter with Christianity eventually led her…
Source: Public Orthodoxy by Nadieszda Kizenko Dr. Katherine Kelaidis recently published a piece in this forum on ‘Headscarves, Modesty, and Modern Orthodoxy.’ The article, a loving homage to Kelaidis’s grandmother, aunts, and mother, describes the pressures faced by Greek immigrant women of the American Mountain West two generations ago, by contemporary Muslim women, and by Orthodox women under Ottoman rule. Acknowledging head covering as a historical code for women’s modesty and chastity—shared, one might point out, by Orthodox Jews, African American ‘church ladies,’ Roman Catholics before Vatican II, and Episcopalians before the social changes of the 1960s—the author then makes two unexpected turns.…
Source: The Baltimore Sun By Jonathan M. Pitts, Contact Reporter The Baltimore Sun Growing up a Southern Baptist in eastern Tennessee, Brent Gilbert says, he never realized there were other ways to worship. He figured everyone knew the best church music was contemporary. He was sure there was a 45-minute pastor’s sermon at the heart of every Sunday service. And didn’t all Christians agree that religious art, symbols and rituals were relics of a less desirable past? Then he encountered the ancient faith that would change his life. In the formal liturgy, rituals and language of the Greek Orthodox Church, he…