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Due to a busy class schedule, I have not had the time to address much of the new coverage of the liturgical meetings between Pope Benedict XVI and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, celebrating the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle. I think most of the symbolism and the substance in those meetings will be included in the major stories tomorrow and I should be able to catch up a bit.
Press reports are starting to filter in on Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey for the Feast of St. Andrew.
A strange thing happened on Sunday as I cruised around the online newspaper world. I ran into a mini-wave of coverage of Eastern Orthodoxy.
This weblog has received a fine comment from Neil Averitt, author of the Washington Post travel piece about his visit to Mount Athos that I mentioned last Thursday. Since this is precisely the kind of dialogue with journalists that this blog welcomes, I thought I would pull his letter out of the comments pages to share with more readers.
I have received several private emails and calls requesting information about the funeral for Mary “Stolzi” Stolzenbach. I hope that this post reaches her many online friends at other websites and listservs.
Just before I left for vacation, I dashed off a short GetReligion item about that Newsweek cover story that promised to offer the inside scoop, the real story, of President George W. Bush’s tense trip to Russian for the G8 summit. I was struck that the story was completely faith-free. So I wrote:
Many Orthodox Christians, at some point in their lives, claim a particular priest as their “spiritual father” and as a special source of inspiration in the faith. When my family converted to Orthodoxy, it was very much under the spiritual leadership of a gentle Southern Baptist turned archpriest named Father Gordon Walker, now the retired — a meaningless word in his case — leader of St. Ignatius Orthodox Church in Franklin, Tenn.
So, unless I have missed something somewhere, it does not appear that a bishop — or perhaps even a priest — showed up to help lead the memorial services for the butcher of Belgrade.
One or two people have asked me if I would comment on the allegations of financial scandal in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), a branch of Eastern Orthodoxy here in North America with Russian roots.
