I tend to shy away from such cliché expressions as, “God called me to come to St. Vladimir’s.” And yet, I am at a loss to explain it any other way. I can remember waking up the first morning after my family made the move to SVOTS, looking out of...

Andrew Boyd There is still nothing in my life experience quite like “Ed Day.” I suppose it could be like a parish festival, but the parish I grew up in didn’t have one. It seems to me, that it is more than that. Orthodox Education Day points to something beyond...

Sarah Bracey-Johnson Thanksgiving is a classic example of how time flows here St. Vladimir’s. Other institutions may experience it in a roughly linear fashion. Here it pools and eddies, and occasionally it seems to be going backward. Thus it is only natural that we celebrate Thanksgiving well in advance of...

David Wooten One week ago, my family and I took part in the St. Vladimir’s Theophany celebrations for the first time. We had not been able to attend services last year, as we had been back home in Texas during Theophany, and only made it back from visiting my wife’s...

Adam Horstman In St. Matthew’s Gospel, we see that in meeting the needs of the hungry, sick, and imprisoned, we are ministering directly to Jesus, who considers the poor, sick, and the imprisoned to be his brothers. Theology must be applied in the concrete reality of our everyday existence. By...

A dozen of us gathered before sunrise on January 23, 2012, outside the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Bookstore, to travel to our nation’s capital. We went to represent St. Vladimir’s at the 39th annual March for Life, an event that marks the anniversary of the tragic ruling of our Supreme Court...

Seminarian Dn. David Wooten Five of us from St. Vladimir’s—Dn. Timothy Yates, Monk James Stevens, Seminarian Adam Horstman, Hierodeacon Herman Majkrzak, and myself, Dn. David Wooten—recently traveled to nearby St. Joseph’s Seminary (aka "Dunwoodie"), a Roman Catholic seminary in Yonkers, to take advantage of a post-abortion counseling training seminar. St...

Monk James What is living at St. Vladimir’s like for a monk? I am not what one would call a stereotypical monk. From my days as a novice I have been given “obediences,” that is to say I’ve accepted certain tasks given to me by my spiritual father, that have...

Harrison Basil Russin A third–year seminarian writes about gaining a new perspective through prison ministry I had an appointment to meet with the prison chaplain in his office at 1:00 p.m. I arrived my habitual ten minutes early. Actually, it was probably earlier than that, because I wasn’t sure how...

Richard Ajalat A third–year Antiochian seminarian writes about serving at a liturgy in which his patriarch, His Beatitude Ignatius IV, presided His Beatitude Patriarch Ignatius IV (Hazim) of Antioch and all the East, His Eminence The Most Rev. Metropolitan Philip, archbishop of New York and Metropolitan of All North America...