The Interim Dean of Students at Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Christian Seminary, Monk and Deacon Theodore Stanway, will speak on the teachings of the late Romanian Priest George Calciu, one of the great confessors of Christianity in the twentieth century under the Communist yoke. Fr. Calciu suffered severe physical and psychological torture in a hellish Communist prison designed to shape a new human personality along atheistic lines, and emerged as a revered spiritual elder in the Orthodox tradition.
The talk will be at 7 p.m. on Sunday Oct. 17 in the outdoor classroom area between Bertrand Library and Academic West, rain location Gardner Lecture Hall.
Father Calciu’s lessons are especially pertinent to young people today grappling with finding and keeping traditional Christian faith amid an increasingly materialistic technocratic culture that claims to reshape human nature and the environment without God.
Father Theodore is a monk at Holy Trinity Monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in Jordanville, NY (near Cooperstown), the flagship monastery and seminary of the exiled Russian Church Synod during the era of Communist rule in Russia and Eastern Europe, and a center of a vibrant renewal of interest in Russian Orthodoxy in the West today. A veteran of the Royal Navy and native of Glasgow, Father Theodore himself is a “Scottish Orthodox” Christian in the Russian tradition, and earned his M.Div. from Holy Trinity recently with a thesis on the Orthodox Church in India.
The talk is sponsored by the Bucknell Orthodox Christian Fellowship, the Bucknell Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, and St. John Orthodox Christian Mission Church, which serves the Bucknell Orthodox Christian community.
On the morning of Oct. 17, Father Theodore will give the homily at the Divine Liturgy at St. John’s at 10 a.m.