I was recently asked to serve my parish's bookstore ministry by writing a blurb in the church's monthly email newsletter in hopes of driving more foot traffic to the store after Liturgy on Sundays. For my inaugural effort, I did a high-level overview of Fr Andrew Stephen Damick's Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape. My "hook" was an assertion that Orthodox Christians in the deeply pluralistic West bear the burden of 1 Peter 3:15 much more heavily than do their brothers and sisters in historically Orthodox lands, and even more heavily than other Western Christians due to the rather exclusive nature of Orthodox historical claims. "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you," urges the Apostle Peter to his readers. I've gotten to thinking in the days since writing the above blurb about how I might answer if thusly called to account, and this post is an effort to flesh out that account prior to being put on the spot. And frankly, I am prone to calling myself to account on a semi-frequent basis, so what follows is something of how I tend to answer the challenge.

Some years ago now (I can't recall how many), the headlines one morning were filled with news of church bombings in Egypt. There have been so many in the last handful of years that I can no longer remember if it was Christmas or Easter, or some other high feast day of the Coptic Church. In any case, I somehow came upon an Arabic report about the event that had been translated into English. In it, Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church at the time was asked to comment on the attack which had left multiple ancient churches battered and blood-soaked from all the dead and injured. While the event had stoked the outrage of Western Christians, Pope Shenouda spoke only of his sorrow for the darkened souls of the terrorists, and even pleaded with them to embrace the love of Christ so that they might even embrace their victims as brothers and sisters (my paraphrase because I can no longer find the report online). My heart had never been on the receiving end of so searing an indictment, and nor has it since.