Dear “John”, I understand that you are on the way to becoming Orthodox. I know nothing about you, beyond the fact that you are English. Before we go any further, there is one point I should make clear. I have not been told why you are about to convert, but I assure you there is no point whatsoever if it is for negative reasons. You will find as much “wrong” (if not more) in Orthodoxy as in... 

God has a plan for each and everyone one of us and we must have faith in him. That was what I was taught in Sunday School growing up. I knew the lesson, but I never understood it. Not until I experienced some difficult events in my life. I was 28 years old and I had a fulfilling life. I was married, I had a 5 year old daughter, a wonderful job, and we just built a house for our growing family. We knew... 

When Matt’s mom asked me to visit him, I was reluctant. It wasn’t only that I’d never been inside a jail. There was also the fact that I’d seen him before, and didn’t imagine he’d be particularly receptive to a priest. I’d seen, not met him. It was late one evening at the bowling alley when a colorful cast of youths took over the lane next to my wife and me. Baggy... 

Tatyana Mendesh Korreiya shared her journey to Orthodoxy in an interview by Fr. Dimitriy Smirnov. “Maniaku” woman I became Russian Tanya at birth. My father named me so. Many people think that I took the name on my own because I liked how it sounds. But that’s not true. I grew up in a foster home in Ivanovo, Russia. I am a daughter of a politician. Some time ago children of politicians in Africa,... 

After an incredible, almost unbelievable life, one man tells THEO PANAYIDES how his search for love was finally successful Klaus Kenneth is God’s gift to newspapers. His life, as he tells it, has been so full of incident and adventure that the only problem for a journalist is how to fit it all in. He was a gang leader at 12, a terrorist at 22 and a junkie at 25. He’s been a Buddhist monk, a Hindu... 

In an English village Near to the geographical centre of England you can find Rolleston, the tiny village where I was born. My family were farmers, as their ancestors had been for generations. In the heart of the village and under the jurisdiction of the Church of England stood the ancient parish church of The Holy Trinity. For centuries it had been the centre of village life. There were no other... 

This past summer, I was working out at the YMCA for an hour a day, five days a week. Thanks to free child-care, I was able to aerobicise, weight lift, and torture my core muscles via Pilates on a very regular basis, and I felt strong, lean, alert. When fall rolled around, however, my schedule got a whole lot tighter and more intense. Devoting 60 minutes or more to the gym (when I had kids to shuttle... 

As a Jewish convert to Christ via evangelical Protestantism, I naturally wanted to know God better through the reading of the Scriptures. In fact, it had been through reading the Gospels in the “forbidden book” called the New Testament, at age sixteen, that I had come to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and our promised Messiah. In my early years as a Christian, much of my religious... 

(True life story by Thomas) In may of 1980, the singer /poet Ian Curtis of Joy Division hung himself in his Manchester, England home the day before he was to depart for their big U.S. tour. On the same day in Washington State, Mt. St. Helen’s erupted, and a young man prepared for high school graduation, and the turmoil that his life would soon become. The day after graduation, I left for San... 

Ahmed was born in the seventeenth century to a Muslim family in Constantinople. By profession he was a copyist in the Great Archives. In accordance with Ottoman law, since he did not have a wife, he had a slave instead, a Russian woman. Another captive from Russia lived together with her, an old woman, also a slave. Both these women were very pious. On feast days the old woman would go to church. Taking...