“I came immediately when the war started and ended up right in the middle of mayhem in eastern Ukraine very quickly,” he said.

In recent months, his pictures have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. He was among the first to document the mass killings of unarmed civilians in Bucha. In April, he photographed the country’s embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at the presidential compound in the capital, Kyiv. And in June, he spent time with soldiers near the front line in the Donbas. One of his pictures—of a young woman rescuing dogs from a shelter in Irpin amid Russian attack in the early days of the war—has taken on a life of its own as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

It’s the kind of work that Occhicone has wanted to do since he was an undergraduate at Fordham in the early 1990s, when a friend and fellow classmate of Croatian descent showed him magazine stories depicting war in the former Yugoslavia. “I remember the pictures, I remember who took them, and it became a kind of goal of mine” to become a war photographer, Occhicone said by phone from Kyiv in early March.

Another inspiration, he said, was his grandfather, a World War II veteran who lived in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, near Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. “The family dream was always to go to Fordham,” Occhicone said. “That was like success, you know? He came from Italy, and seeing the Fordham guys, [he thought], one day, somebody in our family will go there.” Occhicone’s grandfather died in 2017 at 101.

“He talked about [his war experiences] until maybe his last day, and it was always about the comradeship and the bonding,” Occhicone said. “That’s something I wanted to understand.”

Evacuating Civilians Amid the Battle of Irpin

On Saturday, March 5, as Russian forces surrounded Kyiv on all sides but the south, Occhicone joined a convoy of volunteers who arranged to help evacuate several dozen people hiding in a church basement in Irpin, a city about a dozen miles northwest of Kyiv. To help slow the Russian advance, Ukrainian forces had blown up a bridge over the Irpin River, one of the main routes leading out of the city toward Kyiv.

“We were deep in the city [bringing people out], and in the middle of it, we started getting shelled—small arms fire flying overhead, tanks shooting buildings maybe 200 meters away,” Occhicone said the next day. “We were able to get out, but right in front of us, maybe like a couple of hundred feet, guys blew up a Russian vehicle, a road was closed. It was just chaotic. You don’t know who’s where.”

Occhicone returned to the city to photograph and assist with successive waves of evacuations near the battered bridge.

“I don’t know who said war is hell, but it is hell, and you’ve got to document it,” he said on March 17, describing the fear experienced by civilians leaving homes burned to the ground, carrying a “plastic bag with some shoes” in it.

By the end of March, Irpin was “an abandoned ghost town of ruined buildings,” Reuters reported, but Ukrainian forces had recaptured the city and helped prevent a siege of Kyiv.

In Bucha, Helping a Son Find and Bury His Father

In early April, Occhicone was one of the first photojournalists to arrive in Bucha, about 20 miles northwest of Kyiv, after it was liberated. “When we entered the city, we saw [people] putting the Ukrainian flag up at the city hall,” he said. He also saw and documented graphic evidence of war crimes.

Retreating Russian soldiers had left behind dozens of dead civilians, some with their hands tied—atrocities that prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to describe Russia’s war in Ukraine as genocide. In an auto repair shop in an industrial part of town, Occhicone photographed the body of a man in work clothes with a gunshot wound to his head. He apparently had been executed and left in a well in the garage.

“At the time, I didn’t know who he was. I just assumed he was a mechanic,” Occhicone said, “and my father’s an auto mechanic by trade—he owned a gas station, real estate, and other stuff, but that’s how he started out. So I see this older man executed in what I thought was his place of business, and that’s probably the one that affected me the most.”

About two weeks later, a Bucha city councilwoman contacted Occhicone. She had been collecting pictures of the atrocities from journalists and others in an effort to help residents locate missing family members, she said, and a young man had seen the picture of the man in the garage and recognized the body as his father’s. She asked if Occhicone would like to meet the family at the morgue in Kyiv in the morning.

Although he was in Romania, taking his first brief vacation in many months, he made the 12-hour drive to meet the family. At the morgue, he learned that the man, Myron Zvarychuk, was not a mechanic but a Ukrainian Orthodox priest. He had been associated with St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, and he was working at a small church in Bucha, where he had been renting a room from an older woman named Kateryna. On the day he disappeared, he had left to get food and water for her.

From the morgue, Occhicone accompanied the family to Father Zvarychuk’s room in Bucha, where they picked up the priest’s vestments. After returning to Kyiv to collect the body, they traveled to his native village, near Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, and Occhicone spent several hours at the family’s home before attending the funeral Mass and burial.

“To be able to meet the family and spend a day with them was really an incredible experience,” Occhicone said. “You normally don’t get to follow up on these things. You’re in a situation where there’s dead bodies all over the place, and it feels very surreal. But to be able to put a name to the man, to know something about him, to meet his family was really a great thing, you know. This guy was a loved person. People loved the village priest.”

Capturing the Spirit of the Resistance

On March 10, while returning to Irpin to document the humanitarian evacuation of the city that was later retaken by Ukrainian forces, Occhicone made what has become his most iconic and widely seen picture of the war.

“In this atmosphere of fear,” he wrote on Instagram that day, “a woman emerges and she is bringing disabled dogs from a shelter to safety.”

He went to sleep after posting the picture, and “the next day, people were like, ‘The president just reposted you.’” He said the image was featured on the country’s official website, and it brought attention to the young woman, Anastasiya Tikha, a veterinary student who runs an animal shelter in Iprin. He allowed the image to be used by a dog food company that sought to raise money for people in Ukraine, he said, and with Tikha’s permission, he provided her bank account information to dozens of people who wanted to send her donations.

“People are making posters and memes of the image,” he said, “and sending me drawings of the photo from all around the world.” For many people, the image has come to symbolize “the cruelty of the Russian war and the dignity of the Ukrainian response,” The Guardian wrote in a May 23 article about Tikha.

“She’s a woman of action, and people love that,” Occhicone said. “And it’s dangerous. This is exactly where [U.S. journalist and filmmaker] Brent Renaud was killed [on March 13], and this girl took all the dogs out of the kennel and just walked them out of town.”

About Christopher Occhicone

After earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham in 1995, Occhicone worked as a teacher in Poland and Italy, and pursued graduate studies in public health at Harvard University and conflict resolution at Seton Hall University. In 2014, he completed the one-year program in documentary practice and visual journalism at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Ashley Purpura, Ph.D., GSAS ’14, an assistant professor of religious studies at Purdue University, has been awarded the center’s NEH Faculty Fellowship. Elena Romashko, a Ph.D. candidate in religious studies at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, has been awarded the center’s NEH Dissertation Completion Fellowship. And Febe Armanios, Ph.D., a professor of history at Middlebury College, has been awarded the center’s Coptic Fellowship.

The research they are engaged in varies significantly, from theology of gender to art history, to a modern historical study of Christian media in the modern Middle East.

“What I love about that is that diversity really showcases what we understand Orthodox Christian Studies to be, as this broad network of methodologies and disciplines that connect scholars who wouldn’t ordinarily be in communication with one another,” said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and co-director of the center.

“But because of this common core of history, thought, and culture of the Orthodox Christian world, you have these projects that end up being connected through the center.”

Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture and co-director of the center, agreed, noting that in the three years since the first fellowship was offered, applications have come from around the globe.

“One of the things we really look for, and it’s really evident in all three of these fellows, is some kind of engagement with Orthodox Christianity in conversation with contemporary thought,” he said.

A Space for Feminist Critique

Purpura earned her Ph.D. in the history of Christianity at Fordham. Her first book,
God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium (Fordham University Press, 2018) offered a rethinking of the development and maintenance of “hierarchy” as a theological concept. She will use her fellowship to work on her second monograph, tentatively titled Sanctifying the Patriarchal Woman: (mis)Representing Gender Equality in Orthodox Christian Tradition.

Her hope is the book will provide a space for conversation around feminist claims and how they clash with aspects of Orthodox Christianity. Most major religions, including those that have historically been patriarchal, are engaged in these conversations, but Orthodox Christianity has lagged, she said.

“I’m not trying to recover a tradition that hasn’t been recorded, but just point to the spaces where the tradition that we have is problematic if we do theologically believe, as Orthodox Christians, that women are spiritually and equal to men, made in the image and likeness of God,” she said.

“We need to talk about gender as something central to our theological understanding.”

The Role of Religion During Disaster

Romashko, a native of Belarus, will use her fellowship to begin writing her dissertation, “Coping with Disaster: Visual Narratives of Vernacular Religion in the Post-Chernobyl World.”

In it, she plans to analyze Russian Orthodox icons depicting the Chernobyl disaster and Russian Orthodox churches built to commemorate it in Belarus. Growing up there, she said, she took for granted the ways in which the disaster is internalized in daily life. When she moved to Germany, she found very little had been written about what she lived through.

“All the research that I could find on Chernobyl was about Ukraine, and it was written mostly about either how it medically affected people, or what it meant for the breakdown of the Soviet Union,” she said, noting that she’s focused on areas of the country that are still populated occupied today, and not the “frozen zone” surrounding the destroyed power plant.

“Very little is written about Belarus, even though 23% of the area that was contaminated was there.”

As part of the dissertation, she will direct special attention to memorial art such as The Savior of Chernobyl, which was used to convey fears and challenges caused by nuclear contamination. She’s especially interested in the representation of women, children, and people with disabilities.

“How do they describe how this completely technological disaster should be depicted through images such as Mary and Jesus, or similar things? Because it was truly an atheistic country at the time when it all started,” she said.

“What can it tell us about how religion deals with crisis, how religion deals with ecological pollution, with things like radiation, which we cannot perceive through the senses?”

Harnessing Media for Faith

Armanios will use the Coptic Fellowship to write “Coptic Orthodox Television: A Modern History,” which focuses on the history of Coptic channels in Egypt and the Coptic Christian diaspora. It is the final section of her book manuscript, Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East.

It’s a project she began 10 years ago when she began examining how television played a role in the Coptic Christian Orthodox community in Egypt.

“I started asking questions about the origins of what Christians in Egypt were watching, what channels were they drawn to, and lo and behold, this opened a Pandora’s box of a much larger project about the special history of Christian television in the entire Middle East,” she said.

“Who is starting these channels, what is their programming like, what are they trying to achieve with their audiences, what kind of message are they trying to put out there in terms of their identity, their community, politics?”

Demacopoulos said this year’s cohort of fellows, which was chosen by an independent team of evaluators, is all women, just as it was last year. This is a happy coincidence, he said.

“It’s an indication that when you go into the fellowship process looking for new and creative projects, you end up selecting perhaps a different kind of recipient then you might have 20 or 30 years ago,” he said.

“All three of these projects are really speaking to the modern church even though they’re drawing in certain ways on the history of Orthodox thinking and tradition. They’re all absolutely engaged with questions of the modern church.”

Asavei, a lecturer at Charles University’s Institute of International Studies in Prague, joins the center thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of Aesthetics, Disinterestedness, and Effectiveness in Political Art (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), published just this month.

Speaking via Skype from Tbilisi, Georgia, where she conducted research, Asavei said she was excited that the fellowship would allow her to explore lesser known connections between art, politics, and spirituality. In particular, she plans to focus on political resistance through religious, neo-Orthodox art in post-communist Romania. She will publish her findings as a journal article.

Romania, which is where Asavei was born and raised, was home to an art scene that blossomed after the 1989 fall of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. Artists interested in the spiritual dimension of life, irrespective of the political status quo, generated works that were political in the sense that they addressed humanity at large, but didn’t try to polarize people into “us and them,” camps, Asavei said. Her plan is to bring to bear her expertise in philosophy and phenomenology to figures such as Romanian sculptor and painter Marian Zidaru, whose work has been traditionally pegged as religious, neo-orthodox art.

“There is idea that the artistic neo-avant-garde doesn’t assimilate neo-orthodoxies, because according to these views, neo-orthodox artistic production is not political,” she said.

“I want to show that, actually, all these forms of artistic production instantiated a form of ‘prophetic activism.’ It was not like a straightforward resistance, like this oppositional type of resistance, but more like a spiritual resistance.” She credited artist and scholar Tom Block with informing her analysis.

Asavei compared this prophetic activism to the ways in which Jewish and Roma groups who were confined to ghettos practiced their religion in silence, in defiance of authorities who’d banned such practices. And just as important, she argues that artists are to this day continuing the practice, in deference to past tradition. Romanian painter Constantin Flondor, for instance, still incorporates a symbol of bread common to Orthodox Christianity in his work.

“This was not about resisting only Ceaușescu and his cultural policy and his imposed national Communist cultural production. Their so-called spiritual resistance is lasting. Even now, they are still producing the same kind of artworks, the same kind of performances, and engaging many communities of people,” she said.

She said she was drawn to Fordham’s center because of its embrace of scholars who are able to tap into multiple disciplines.

“For me, there is no need to bridge these two cultural fields [of religion and art]because they are already so much intermingled,” she said.

Asavei also has a personal connection to the work, as a member of the Orthodox Christian Church.

“The Orthodox tradition I came from is improving more and more with this advent of contemporary culture, and contemporary art especially, in terms of openness to other sets of concerns, like social justice and caring for the excluded and the disenfranchised, such as refugees,” she said.

“So it’s not only about my Orthodox community versus some other religious community, it’s about sharing a set of concerns from an Orthodox kind of framework.”

George E. Demacopoulos, Ph.D., the Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and co-director of the center, said Asavei’s integration of philosophy, art, and political science makes her research especially appealing.

“We are thrilled to offer our first faculty research fellowship to Dr. Asavei, whose research offers a powerful testimony to the ways in which Orthodox Christian Studies illuminates so many dimensions of our contemporary world,” Demacopoulos said.

One grant, for $360,000, comes from the Henry Luce Foundation, while the other, for $250,000, comes from Leadership 100. The center received the Leadership 100 grant in February, and the Luce grant in March.

The Center will use the grants to fund an interdisciplinary, international research initiative on Orthodox Christianity’s complex, even turbulent, engagement with human rights discourse.

Center co-director George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies, said he and his colleagues will bring together the world’s foremost scholars to collaborate with journalists, public intellectuals, and policy makers for the study.

The goal of the project is to create and disseminate comprehensive analyses of the contemporary relationship between Orthodox Christianity and human rights that can be shared with Orthodox leaders and heads of state around the world .

A Resistance to the West

The issue is especially pressing today, because the Russian Orthodox Church, which counts 70 million of the world’s 260 million Orthodox Christians, has in recent years disputed the modern definitions of universal human rights. In former Soviet Union countries where a majority of the population is Orthodox Christian, leaders are ambivalent about a universal conception of human rights that they perceive to be dictated by the West.

Demacopoulos said that the feeling is not universal though. In countries such as Syria or Turkey, where Orthodox Christians form the majority of the Christian component of society but are still very much in the minority overall, those Orthodox Christian communities absolutely embrace human rights and the notion of religious freedom.

In addition to addressing leaders within the Orthodox Christian faith, Demacopoulos said the project, which will rely on the research of 15 scholars, will offer guidance to authorities such as the U.S. State Department and the European Union. The scholars will meet at an annual three-day meeting over the five-year period and will publish academic books and articles as well as op-eds, blogs, and new media.

“We want to provide leaders with more comprehensive, nuanced, and sophisticated understanding about what is actually going on here, so they don’t just take propaganda pieces and assume that the entire Orthodox world or even the entire Russian world believes this,” he said.

Offering a Nuanced Perspective

Fellow co-director Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, said the Russian Orthodox Church has been trying to redefine human rights language in such a way that allows them to uphold “traditional values” for the last decade. This understanding of human rights doesn’t protect a band like Pussy Riot from protesting in a Church, or art that’s deemed blasphemous, and it’s consistent with laws that ban gay marriage and homosexual “propaganda.”

“Normally people would say, that’s a violation of human rights, and some Orthodox Christians want to say ‘No it’s not. We have our own particular interpretation of human rights, and we are justified in doing that because the West’s concept of human rights is biased and anti-Christian,” he said. “Our project hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of Orthodox Christianity’s relation to human rights language than the diametrical opposition proposed by certain Orthodox Christians, especially in the post-communist context.”

Papanikolaou further noted that the Russian government also uses the language of human rights and the defense of religious freedom to justify its ongoing military intervention in Syria.

“It’s a big post-Communist issue, and it’s of a piece a wider, global critique of western liberalism,” he said.

“Western theorizers of human rights have got to pay attention to Russia, and more broadly to the Orthodox Christian world.”

This comes on the heels of a new report about “Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century,” released by Pew on Nov. 8, which found that “over the last century, the Orthodox Christian population around the world has more than doubled and now stands at nearly 260 million. In Russia alone, it has surpassed 100 million, a sharp resurgence after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet despite these increases in absolute numbers, Orthodox Christians have been declining as a share of the overall Christian population – and the global population – due to far faster growth among Protestants, Catholics and non-Christians.”

The report also found that many people who now identify as Orthodox Christians do not see religion as an important part of their lives. Demacopoulos was asked to explain this gap between religious identity and religious practice in much of the Orthodox world:

“It is very difficult for Americans to appreciate the ways in which religion and cultural identity overlap in the Orthodox world. For most Americans, religious commitment consists primarily of a set of doctrinal faith affirmations: “I believe in this and this, but not that.” In most of the world, however, religious identity and association operate on much deeper level, with strong, community-based, cultural associations,” Demacopoulos said.

“Being Orthodox is not so much about checking off a list of dogmatic propositions as it is being tied to local and regional culture. Thus, it would not at all be uncommon for someone in Greece or Russia to identify as Orthodox and participate in major community celebrations tied to Christianity (Easter, Christmas, Theophany, etc.) but not actually believe in the teachings of the church or, possibly, even in God.”

Read the full Q&A at the Pew FactTank blog.

“He ensconced himself on the ambo in the center of the Royal Doors and delivered a thoroughly secularly speech extoling the fatherland and the church’s role in bolstering the fatherland,” said Father Galadza, the Kule Family Professor of Liturgy at Saint Paul University, Ottawa.

“Even during Romanov era the czar has never been allowed to speak from holy space of the Royal Doors.”

That “political intrusion into the sacred” became symbolic of the religious undertones of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which was the topic of an Orthodox Christian Studies Center discussion at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Nov. 4.

“Putin’s campaign in Ukraine is tragic because the natural goodwill between Ukrainians and Russians that had predominated during period of Ukrainian independence is now being sorely tested,” Father Galadza said.

Because of the close ties between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches, the Russian government has often employed religion to pursue its political aims, including fanning nationalistic flames within religious communities and even bringing criminal charges against clergy to pressure religious leaders.

“The fear is that Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church will swallow the Ukrainian Orthodox Church through the Moscow Patriarchate and bring Ukraine that way into Russia,” said Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, the chief rabbi of Kiev and all of Ukraine.

Rabbi Bleich gave the example of his own experience in a government-organized group called the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations.

“We would come to meetings once a month and talk about essentially nothing because the agenda was set by government people,” Rabbi Bleich said about the organization, which has since claimed independence. “Basically, government took all the religious leaders, created an organization for us, then locked us in a room and threw away the key.”

The use of religion is just one smokescreen Putin has created to shape the ongoing conflict, said Adrian Karatnycky, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. Another is to spread propaganda casting it as a “civil war.”

“By now it may have the elements of a civil war, but it is a civil war that was constructed from outside,” Karatnycky said. “There were only a few thousand people disgruntled and engaged in protest at first. Then there was a wave of trained fighters who came to reinforce them. Now this is a fight by a new group of people empowered by money and weapons from the Kremlin.”

In reality, the conflict is a military incursion, not a civil conflict, panelists said.

“There is no civil war. It’s a bunch of terrorists who are getting arms from people who have an interest in retaining the situation,” said Rabbi Bleich.

“People ask, ‘When will there be peace?’ It won’t be with Putin. Putin doesn’t want peace now. He wants the situation to stay the way it is — instability, a war economy, not allowing Ukraine to develop into a thriving democracy with its own economy, which will could dominate Russia.”

The panel featured:

• Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kiev and all of Ukraine and vice president (Ukraine) of the World Jewish Congress;
• Father Peter Galadza, the Kule Family Professor of Liturgy at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Saint Paul University, Ottawa;
• Father Cyril Hovorun, research fellow at Yale Divinity School;
• Adrian Karatnycky, nonresident senior fellow at the Transatlantic Relations Program with the Atlantic Council;
• Olena Nikolayenko, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science at Fordham; and
• Moderator Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture and cofounder of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

The panel discussion was co-sponsored through gifts received from the Jaharis Family Foundation, Inc., the Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation, Inc., and the Office of Alumni Relations at Fordham.

This year’s lecturer, Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, will be awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa.

Orthodoxy in America Lecture and Honorary Degree Ceremony
Tuesday, Sept. 30
6:30 p.m.
University Church | Rose Hill Campus

One of the most preeminent theologians of the past 40 years, Archbishop Williams is a leading expert on Orthodox Christianity, especially on the works of contemporary Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky. His scholarship, which has been influential across denominations, and his leadership within the Anglican Communion is proof of the “ecumenical character of his life,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., co-founder of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center and the Archbishop Demetrios Professor in Orthodox Theology and Culture.

“He has attempted to build bridges with other Christians—especially Catholic and Orthodox Christians—through his leadership and scholarly writings,” Papanikolaou said. “His scholarship includes writings on the patristic tradition, contemporary Orthodox theology, and his recent critically acclaimed book on Fydor Dostoyevsky.”

Archbishop Williams was born in Wales and studied theology at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. He served as Archbishop of Canterbury for ten years before stepping down in 2012 to become Master of Magdalene College.

Fordham’s Orthodoxy in America Lecture series is the largest annual lecture of its kind and is the only one housed within a university setting. In addition, it is the only one to explore how the Orthodox tradition intersects with the American religious experience.

In the United States, less than 1 percent of people identify as Orthodox Christians—however, with an estimated population in excess of 260 million worldwide, Orthodox Christianity represents the second largest Christian tradition in the world.

Now, a grant secured by two Fordham scholars will help bridge the gap between the U.S. population and this important segment of Christians living in some of the most significant global hot-spots.

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University has received a prestigious challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency and one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. This marks the first time that the federal government has provided a grant related specifically to Orthodox Christian studies.

“The NEH grant is the strongest possible endorsement that the work of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is unique, valuable, and necessary not simply for Orthodox Christianity or Catholic-Orthodox relations, but for the humanities writ at large,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and co-founding director of the center.

The 3-to-1 matching grant requires the center to raise $1.5 million, which will be matched by a $500,000 award from the NEH. This resulting $2 million endowment will create the center’s Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence program and Dissertation Completion Fellowship program.

The new two programs will provide a unique opportunity for scholars and doctoral students. Both programs, which will eventually fund up to four scholars and two graduate students, are open to scholarship pertaining to orthodox studies in any academic discipline.

The Scholar-in-Residence program is unprecedented for the discipline, while the Dissertation Completion Fellowship program will become one of only two nationwide.

“Years ago, when we had first started thinking about the center, we realized that we could have the greatest long-term impact by sponsoring research, books, and conferences,” said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and co-founding director of the center. “Now we want to create a space where scholars who are studying Orthodox Christian studies can have access to the resources they need to pursue their scholarship.”

Such scholarship, Demacopoulos said, is critical for engaging regions of the world—including the Middle East, Russia, and the Balkans—where Orthodox Christianity is the dominant expression of Christianity. A deeper understanding of orthodox culture is “fundamentally necessary” for those who wish to be involved in these regions through business, foreign affairs, or otherwise, he said.

Moreover, scholarship in Orthodox Studies would help to shed light on the complex relationship between Christianity and Islam, two religions that have typically been seen as pitted against one another.

“In many of these countries, there is a very complicated intersection of religion and politics, and religion and culture that is often entangled in interreligious conflict,” he said. “One possibility that this award enables is that the research that these scholars will do could inspire new ways of thinking about global citizenry and new ways of thinking about Muslim-Christian cohabitation.”

This is the first challenge grant earned by Fordham, which was one of only five institutions nationwide this year to receive the maximum award of $500,000.

“The grant speaks volumes about the quality of scholarship produced in the Orthodox Christian Studies program,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University.

Founded by the two theology professors in 2007, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is the first university-based site for Orthodox Christian Studies in the western hemisphere.

American writer J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and student of the Hindu tradition Advaita Vedanta, would seem an unlikely proponent of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy.

But it was Salinger’s 1961 book Franny and Zooey that helped usher into American thought an ancient Orthodox tradition known as the Philokalia, said the Very Reverend John Anthony McGuckin, Ph.D.

Father McGuckin, the Ane Marie and Bent Emil Nelson Professor in Late Antique and Byzantine Christian History at Union Theological Seminary and professor of Byzantine Studies at Columbia University, was the keynote speaker at the ninth annual installment of the Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series, held Nov. 14.

In his lecture, Father McGuckin traced the roots of the Philokalia, a compilation of spiritual texts, and how this tradition arrived in America.
One of the most important books in the Orthodox tradition, the Philokalia contains the writings of spiritual masters who strived to illuminate the path to religious awakening.

“The collection of texts follows a broad but generic master-theme: the correlation of the search for inner stability with the quest for the transcendental vision of God…whereby the human soul, at its highest level of cognition, might awake in its upper levels of sensibility into the unmediated presence of God,” Father McGuckin said.

Father McGuckin highlighted three Orthodox saints—St. Paisy Velichkovsky, a Romanian Orthodox saint, and St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth—who made important contributions to the Philokalia and helped disseminate it throughout the Eastern world.

Among the Philokalic spiritual practices that these writers and translators emphasized was the Jesus Prayer, a meditation that repeatedly recites the phrase “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” until it becomes ingrained in the mind and heart of the person saying it.

Following the death of St. Paisy, who labored to bring the Philokalia to the Slavic countries, the text was brought further east to Russia and the Ukraine. Here, the Jesus Prayer made its way out of monastic communities and gained popularity among the laity.

In the mid-19th century, two Russian mystics published the Way of the Pilgrim, the story of a poor peasant who masters the Jesus Prayer as he journeys through Russia. The story’s translation into English helped give the Philokalia its final push from the monastery into the “global village,” Father McGuckin said.

“And nowhere [was]that global village more epitomized than New York…in the hip 1960s of the 20th century,” he said.

During this time, the American public was becoming increasingly interested in mystical traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. It was at this time that Salinger penned Franny and Zooey.

The book chronicles the existential crisis of Franny Glass, a Manhattan college student in her 20s who plunges into despair over the selfishness and superficiality she perceives around her. In her anguish, she becomes preoccupied by the Way of the Pilgrim and recites the Jesus Prayer incessantly.

With the help of her elder brothers Zooey and Buddy, Franny looks deeper into the Jesus Prayer and learns that we must have mercy on ourselves and on others—just as the prayer implores God’s mercy. This mercy ultimately translates to love, the “true fabric of existence,” Father McGuckin said.

“Franny’s story revealed to a very large reading public the existence of the Way of the Pilgrim, which became for American Protestants and Catholics a major highway into Orthodox spiritual practice,” Father McGuckin said.

The story also offers a caution, Father McGuckin said.

“We need to take to heart the American icon of Franny Glass, and be wary of using the endless cycles of the repetitive ‘Lord have mercy’ to make us even more neurotic than we presently are,” he said.

“It is wise to remember… that this process needs an experienced guide—even while admiring the courage of many great devotees of the prayer, who still insist that it ought to have wide and public dissemination.”

The annual Orthodoxy in America Lecture series, the largest annual lecture of its kind, is sponsored by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.