Father Daniel, priest and martyr

The murder of Father Daniel Sysoyev last week has shocked Russia. Father Daniel, aged 34, was shot by a masked gunman at St Thomas’s Church in southern Moscow last week. The parish choir director, Vladimir Strelbitsky, was wounded in the shooting.
Father Daniel worked in a multiethnic suburb of Moscow, where people of many different nationalities [...]

Priest shot in Moscow

I received the following e-mail from Fr Maxim Obukhov of Moscow:
Fr Daniel Sysoev shot in Moscow
Fr Daniel Sysoev was of Tartar origin (ethnic Tartar, turk people in the
east of Russia, mostly muslems) had Muslem background. He knew Islam and
Tartar culture and was active missionary, wrote some Christian polemic books
about Islam. His books were not agressive [...]

Nativity Fast blogging challenge – failed

Observations from an Empty Well: 30 (40) Days of Blogging; Calendars, Old and New:
Some of you may have come across the website for The Preacher’s Institute, started by Arizona’s own Fr. John Peck, the priest serving the Orthodox mission church in Prescott. Fr. John is a genuinely good person, and his ‘challenge’ to blog daily [...]

Vespers and Slava

St Nicholas Church just before the beginning of Vespers
On Saturday evening we celebrated Vespers at the Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton, Johannesburg, followed by our family Slava.
Unfortunately our parish priest, Fr Athanasius Akunda, was not able to be present, as he bhad to attend a meeting in Nigeria, and his connecting flight [...]

Culltural rituals and globalisation: Hallowe’en and Slava

Eroticdreambattle – Not Paella: “In Leeds, the Muslim kids went trick-or-treating with witches’ hats over their hijabs. It was unspeakably cute.”
I once knew a couple of American kids in Namibia (now comfortably middle-aged) who were discussing what they should do about Hallowe’en. They realised that Hallowe’en was not big in Namibia. None of the other [...]

Anglicans and Orthodoxy

The news that the Roman Catholic Church has set up a new mechanism for receiving disaffected Anglicans has caused a bit of a flurry in the Christian blogosphere. The Orthodox have also been talking to disaffected Anglicans; recently Metropolitan Jonah, of the Orthodox Church in America, addressed a breakaway group, the Anglican Church of North [...]

Vanishing articles

The following missiological articles will be disappearing from the web on 26th October 2009. Read them while you have the chance.
Most of them were originally published in Missionalia, the journal of the Southern African Missiological Society (SAMS).

African Independent Churches – judgment through terminology? by Stephen Hayes
African “Jews” for Jesus – mission among the Lemba, by [...]

Ennui, entropy and apathy

Today is Blog Action Day
More than 7000 bloggers have registered to participate and thousands more will join in the next 24 hours. There’s already buzz growing across the blogosphere and on Twitter in anticipation, with updates from around the world every minute about the upcoming event.
If you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late.
We will [...]

Emerging church in Russia

The Russian Orthodox Church’s emerging role – Telegraph:
In the 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet system, the Russian Church has been rebuilt from ruins inhabited by shuffling old women and somewhat eccentric zealots into the most powerful body on the post-Soviet stage.
No other Russian social institution has experienced such a rising from the [...]

Righteous anger

A couple of days ago one of my Pagan blogging friends wrote The Stroppy Rabbit:
It has long been observed that some Odinists have right-wing tendencies (though by no means all, as the Heathens against Hate campaign demonstrates). The other two Pagans described above may not be Odinists, however.
There is no place in Paganism for far [...]