Do you love your eastern Christian tradition so much that you wish you could share it with the whole world?  Soon, you might be able to do that.

With God’s help, at some point in the future, there will be a television network where the splendors of the Eastern Church will be available for all to see.  But right now, there is a website that does the same.  The website is www.oltvweb.com.

You can access that website at any hour of the day or night, from any place in the world, and immediately re-live past Orientale Lumen conferences. You will find complete plenary session speeches, and filmed liturgies from past conferences, along with some introductory material. 

The website is Phase I of what, with God’s help, will be a four phase effort to share the glories of the Eastern Church with the whole world through the wonder of modern technology.  Phase II of this project will include the addition of more programs to the website — and fundraising for future Phases.  Phase III will develop additional programming and produce broadcast-quality material that can be aired on existing public service or cable network stations such as Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN).  We hope that Phase IV will be a modest satellite network for prime-time programs through a cable and/or satellite television station of our own.

Is this ambitious?  You might say so.  But it is not the effort of man, but of the Holy Spirit. I have no rigid time frame for anything except Phases I and II. Phase I is well underway, and Phase II will continue for the rest of this year and into next.

None of this was my idea!  Last year, during the Tenth Anniversary Orientale Lumen Conference in Washington, DC, I was driving His Beatitude Patriarch Gregorios III (head of the Melkite Greek-Catholic Church of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and All the East) to the airport.  Along the way, we got to brainstorming about a number of topics.

Our conversation turned to the need for a modern media outlet to provide eastern Christian audio and visual programming.  We arrived at the name “Orientale Lumen Television” – or just OLTV.  We agreed to pursue these ideas and that the whole project would be under his personal patronage.

And so it is.  We are starting very small.  Right now, I have just two graduate students, Mark Mourachian and Andrew Hayes, and the family of Mark Northrop, who has recorded all the OL conferences since number III in 1998, working part-time on this project.   They edit and prepare the video footage from previous conferences into suitable length for website viewing.  I also have a webmaster, Taylor Johnson, who designs and programs the website for video viewing on an inexpensive web-hosting service.  As the amount of material grows, and hopefully the number of viewers, we will move to a hosting service that specializes in video streaming and multi-media.

If I could afford it, I would like to hire them all full-time, and the project could move faster.  But we do what we can with the resources we have.

I will keep you informed through Jack’s Corner as new material becomes available online.  And I will keep you informed as the project develops.

In the meantime, I ask your prayers, for God’s blessing upon this work.