On June 5th Rector of St. George Church, priest Igor Tarasov and the Church Warden, Olga Roussanow attended a lecture of a well-known Russian Orthodox theologian and missionary, Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev. The meeting was held at the hall of St. Nicholas Patriarchal Cathedral in New York.
Fr. Andrei Kuraev is a famous modern theologian, an author of the number of books and articles and a professor of the Orthodox schools of high learning in Moscow. It was his first visit to the United States.
The lecture was organized by the Youth Department of the Patriarchal Parishes in the USA and gathered around one hundred people, most of them young. Fr. Igor Tarasov asked the first question regarding Fr. Andrei’s view of the present state of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia, as well as in the world. To answer that, Fr. Andrei gave a long and detailed speech on the situation in the Church life, changes in dogmatic, liturgical, disciplinary and social aspects in modern Orthodoxy. He named a number of challenges the Russian Church faces on today’s world, including secularism, Islamic expansion and the lack of spiritual demands among the Russian people.
Fr. Andrei answered many more questions, some of them being interesting. For instance, when asked whether salvation is available only to the Orthodox Christians, he pointed out that only God can grant salvation. It is also an individual thing. “Let us not worry about salvation of other people, but about whether I am going to be saved,” – said Fr. Andrei. One of the most memorable statements Fr. Kuraev made at this meeting was the following: “Everyone should do the right thing at his or her position, work and serve the Lord and neighbor, and let God worry about everything else”.
At the conclusion of the lecture Fr. Igor and Olga Roussanow purchased the books of Fr. Kuraev and personally expressed their gratitude for his coming to New York.