John P. Burgess

Down a deeply rutted dirt road, far from Russia’s centers of power and wealth, sits a small compound behind twelve-foot-high brick walls. People in the nearest village, several miles away, have heard rumors that an odd man lives there, a monk perhaps. But no one has seen him or knows anything . . . . Continue Reading »

The war in Ukraine is also a battle between conflicting visions of Holy Rus’, Prince Vladimir's legacy, and the Orthodoxy that Russia and Ukraine share.  Continue Reading »

Developments around Pascha this year reveal a much more complex picture of Russia's church-state relations. Continue Reading »

On the outskirts of Moscow, there is an Orthodox Christian memorial. The site, known as Butovo, once belonged to a private estate. The Soviets expropriated the land after the revolution and turned it into a firing range. It was there during Stalin’s purges that more than 20,000 “enemies of the . . . . Continue Reading »

On a summer afternoon at the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula, I shield my face from the blazing sun as I watch archaeologists dig amid the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Chersonesos. Soon I retreat beneath the canopy of a reconstructed rotunda and unexpectedly encounter the remains of a . . . . Continue Reading »

On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Orthodox Church had 50,000 parishes, a thousand men’s and women’s monasteries, and sixty theological schools. By 1941, Stalin had nearly succeeded in eliminating the Church as a public institution. Perhaps only a hundred and fifty to two hundred . . . . Continue Reading »

Germany's communist past is hard to . . . . Continue Reading »