Now all it needs is a home.

With help from two of the University’s most generous donors, the center is well on its way to getting just that—a dedicated space at the Rose Hill campus, designed around the heritage and iconography of Orthodox Christianity, that acts as a leaven for new academic opportunities and student engagement.

The center has been mainly about research and publications since its founding 10 years ago, said George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and one of the center’s two founding directors. However, with this new multipurpose facility, “for the first time we’re really going to be able to focus on the undergraduate students themselves” by providing spaces for informal gatherings as well as events that enrich their education, he said.

He and the other founding director, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, are based at the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses, respectively, and the center has held events in various places at both campuses.

The center will hold all but its biggest events in its new dedicated facility, Demacopoulos said. Located in the 1,500-square-foot space in the basement of Loyola Hall, it will include offices, a conference room, a gathering area, and a small chapel with specially commissioned icons, as well as shelves for hundreds of donated volumes now sitting in boxes. Demacopoulos estimated that construction and renovation of the space could begin in late 2023, putting the center on path to a more rooted existence and doing away with constant searches for event spaces around the University.

The new facility will be a familiar place where students gather for study groups or stop in at the chapel for some quiet reflection. Academic experts and clergy will come for webinars, panel discussions, and other events that illuminate questions of Orthodoxy in the modern world. “It’s going to really be this multipurpose space that is focused on the Jesuit model of integrating learning with faith with service and so forth,” Demacopoulos said.

Housed within a Jesuit university, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center is uniquely positioned to help heal the rift between the Catholic and Orthodox churches—something that was especially appealing to the benefactors who are funding half of the new facility’s cost.

Donors Step In

William S. Stavropoulos, PHA ’61, and his wife, Linda Stavropoulos, have been giving back to Fordham for years, funding scholarships, athletics, and the renovation of Hughes Hall to house the Gabelli School of Business on the Rose Hill campus.

Today, in recognition of the “unbelievable great job” Father McShane did as president of the University, they are making a major gift toward the completion of the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center, a key part of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. As part of that gift, they are also setting aside $250,000 for the construction of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center’s new home.

Their giving is rooted in William Stavropoulos’ Fordham experience, which was, in his words, “a game changer.”

“When I entered the University, coming from a rural high school with a graduating class of 15, I was not sure that I could measure up. I had real doubts in my mind that I could really make it,” he said in accepting the Fordham Founder’s Award in 2014. “But with Fordham’s incredible spirit and culture, they instilled into me a confidence and an education that truly transformed me.”

Professors took a personal interest in him, encouraging him to attend graduate school, he said in an interview. After graduating from Fordham’s College of Pharmacy (which has since closed) in 1961, he earned a doctorate in medicinal chemistry from the University of Washington and went to work at Dow Chemical as a research chemist. He retired from the company 39 years later—as chairman and CEO. He won several awards along the way, including one from the Society of the Chemical Industry recognizing the high ethical standards be brought to that industry.

Through their family foundation, he and Linda Stavropoulos have supported a range of efforts in health care, human services, and higher education—including Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, in part because of its efforts to help bridge a centuries-old divide.

Healing a Schism

Christianity split into the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches nearly a millennium ago, in 1054, due to religious disputes and political conflicts. There have been many steps toward rapprochement between the estranged eastern and western churches—in 1964, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI met in the Holy Land for joint prayer, the first time the two churches’ leaders had met in more than 500 years. A year later, they agreed to revoke the churches’ mutual excommunication decrees dating from 1054.

In 2014, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met for a service in Jerusalem to celebrate the meeting’s 50th anniversary; in a homily, the latter called for shedding “fear of the other, fear of the different, fear of the adherent of another faith, another religion, or another confession.”

Among the attendees were William and Linda Stavropoulos, who went with a group organized by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “It was very moving, and encouraging, that the symbolism of that [meeting]could expand to something on a more tangible, everyday basis,” Linda Stavropoulos said.

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center promotes this cause through scholarship and events such as the Patterson Triennial Conference on Christian Unity. “I think these are times where we need that unity,” William Stavropoulos said. “It seems like we’re having polarization like I’ve never seen before in my lifetime, and I think this is one area where maybe we can get together. I think we’re better united than divided.”

As members of the Greek Orthodox church, he said, he and Linda Stavropoulos have “a natural affinity” for the Orthodox Christian Studies Center and believe in the work it’s doing. In 2014, they made a gift to help the center secure a National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant in support of dissertation fellowships.

Fueling the Growth

This will be the first dedicated physical space the center has ever had, Demacopoulos said. Its large common area will enable informal gatherings by students who are pursuing the Orthodox Christian studies minor or who belong to the Fordham chapter of the Orthodox Christian Fellowship, a nationwide student organization.

Over the past several years, the center has fueled interest in Orthodox Christian studies, drawing students from as far away as California and Eastern Europe, he said. He expects the new facility to amplify this interest and draw more students to the Orthodox Christian studies minor—and not just Orthodox Christians, but also those from outside the tradition who want a better understanding of it.

“The center is not just theology; it’s the whole history, thought, and culture of the Orthodox Christian world, broadly understood,” Demacopoulos said.

By generating new interest in the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, the facility could prompt more faculty members to develop courses that fit the minor and create more opportunities for students to understand Orthodoxy across disciplines, he said.

“It’s going to lead students to see these connections in their other classes—when they’re taking their international business classes, when they’re taking their political science classes, when they’re taking their religion classes, when they’re taking their history classes,” he said. “It’s going to be a much more holistic academic experience for them.”

The new facility is a key priority of the center’s current $5 million 10th Anniversary Campaign: Engaging Orthodoxy, along with creating a research endowment for Orthodox Christian studies at Fordham.

To inquire about supporting the Orthodox Christian Studies Center or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.

“Reason is what attunes us to the reality of where we live, in a way that makes possible the fullest mutual movement of life and intelligent communication. It is to be understood theologically as the embodiment in time and space of the eternal receiving, communicating, and responding that is the life of the second divine metamorphosis,” he said.

“To live consistently as human spirits within this logos-animated exchange is deification—theosis—in the sense of growing into the filial identity for which we are all made.”

Williams, a distinguished theologian and cleric who served as the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, delivered “The Embodied Logos: The Renewal of Mind and the Transformation of Sense,” on the second day of the Patterson Triennial Conference. The conference, which is held every three years by Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, is possible thanks to a 2008 gift from Solon and Marianna Patterson. The two were honored in March at Fordham’s 18th annual Founder’s Dinner.

In his talk, Williams reflected on the writings of Evagrius Ponticus, a Christian monk who lived from 345-399. In particular, he focused on writings such as Ponticus’ The Gnostikos, which translates as “the person with knowledge.”

In it, he said, Ponticus proposed that there are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge we acquire from the outside, and knowledge that comes from God. The former allows us to engage with the reality of the material things around us, while the latter “brings realities into direct contact with our intellective capacity.”

A key challenge for us, he said, is to fully embrace the latter. When we allow ourselves to become enamored with the knowledge we acquire ourselves, or “passionate knowledge,” we neglect to see how we are connected to all things, and are thus prevented from experiencing logos—the Greek word for the word of God, also thought of as the principle of divine reason and creative order.

“The problem then is not that we have made a mistake about our world, but that in one crucial sense, we have mistaken what the world itself is. We have acted, or reacted as though the world were a separate agent or set of agencies with an interest or a gender standing in rivalry to our own individual interests,” he said.

“True knowledge is to know what we know in its relation to its maker. … To know anything or to know anyone is to know them in that way.”

Before introducing Williams, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, presented His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, with the President’s Medal, one of the University’s highest honors.

The Archbishop was awarded an honorary degree from Fordham in a ceremony in 2007, and given his retirement a month ago, Father McShane said it was fitting to honor him again for bringing the community of the Greek Orthodox church to a “position of great renewal.”

“He has been a man of deep learning and deep holiness,” he said.

“When I introduced him to Pope Benedict when the pope was here in New York, I reflected afterward that it was a great honor to introduce the pope to a saint. I stand by this. He has simply been an amazing presence in the United States.”

The archbishop, for whom the Orthodox Christian Studies program’s first chair was named in 2013, was equally effusive in his thanks, saying it was a great surprise to receive it.

“This is a tremendous gift, and knowing that Father McShane is a person of truth, in what he does, what he is, and what he says, that makes this offering that much more important,” he said.

Demacopoulos said he got “loads” of responses—both positive and negative.

“That little op-ed probably got more attention than anything I’ve ever written,” said Demacopoulos, who co-wrote the posting with his Fordham colleague Aristotle “Telly” Papanikolaou, PhD.

Given the reaction, it became clear to them both that fundamentalism needed to be addressed at their next Fordham Orthodox-Catholic relations conference.

From Thursday, June 23 to Saturday, June 25, the fourth installment of the Solon and Marianna Patterson Triennial Conference on Orthodox/Catholic Dialogue will be held at Fordham Law School. (Register online.) With presentations from more than a dozen scholars from the United States and abroad, it will focus attention on the three closely related concepts spelled out in the conference title: “Tradition, Secularization, and Fundamentalism.”

“The animating question of the conference is, how do religious communities that value tradition in a secular age retain that tradition without lapsing into fundamentalism?” said Demacopoulos, professor of theology and the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies.

The question is important because fundamentalism in both the Orthodox and Catholic churches tends to drive those churches further apart, said Papanikolaou, who is a professor of theology, the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, and co-director, with Demacopoulos, of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center. “It’s something that really is affecting Orthodox-Catholic relations,” he said.

And, yet, defining “fundamentalist” can be troublesome, he said.

“Fundamentalists will claim that they’re not fundamentalists—[that]they’re just being true to the tradition,” he said.

Secularization is a hot-button term too, Papanikolaou said, because in sociological circles it has come to refer to “the inevitable withdrawal of religion from public life as a society modernizes.”

Both Papanikolaou and Demacopoulos note that the very term is often seen as inherently biased.

“Some scholars would claim that secularism is a decidedly Western category that always refers to Christianity, and so you can’t map it onto other places in the world that have very different histories of religion and society,” Demacopoulos said.

The conference is endowed by a gift from philanthropists Solon and Marianna Patterson, a husband and wife raised, respectively, in the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions.

As with the three previous Patterson conferences, the proceedings of this one will be published by Fordham University Press, Demacopoulos said.

After the blog posting last year, he said, he and Papanikolaou heard from Orthodox priests and bishops who agreed the professors needed “to say this kind of thing because they can’t.”

“They are hamstrung in what they can say publicly,” he said. “The Roman Catholic church has a number of universities, and they literally see the universities—especially Jesuit universities—as the place where the church does its thinking, and where you have the safety of academic freedom for people to raise questions that you can’t raise in seminaries and you can’t say from the pulpit.”

The Orthodox church doesn’t have that kind of space, Demacopoulos said.

“That’s one thing that makes our Orthodox Christian Studies Center unique and important, is that we can ask the kinds of questions that are often taboo at an Orthodox seminary.”