Several Updates

As we all celebrate the resurrection of Our Lord, I thought it would be helpful to update you on several items you might find interesting.

Orientale Lumen XIII
This year’s conference will be held June 15-18 at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC on the theme of “Monastic Spirituality for Everyday Life.”  We have a very exciting agenda of plenary speakers planned.  You can view or download the brochure, flier and registration form from the website:  www.olconference.com.
We also have reduced the conference fee to encourage people to attend despite our national economic situation.  Although we would like to hold the conference in more regional locations, for economic reasons we just cannot afford the overhead expense of multiple sites this year – perhaps in the future.  We also hope that a single conference will bring everyone together in one place for this “grass roots” ecumenical dialogue.

Orientale Lumen EuroEast III
The next OL Conference planned for Constantinople (Istanbul) will be on July 5-8, 2010 (next summer!) with the full support and blessings of His All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.  The theme will be “Church Councils of the East” and we already have Metropolitan Kallistos, Archimandrite Robert Taft, Sister Vassa Larin, and Professor Richard Schneider lined up as plenary speakers.  We are also planning a post-conference weekend pilgrimage to Ephesus and the Monastery of St. John on Patmos where Metropolitan Kallistos is a professed monk.  We are also going to organize a tour package including airfare, hotels, most meals, conference fee, and other local transportation from Washington, DC as a departure city.  More details will be announced in the future.  So, set aside the dates, and start planning now for the event.  It will be a “trip of a lifetime”!

Orientale Lumen TeleVision
In case you have not seen it yet, we have started a website providing streaming videos you can watch online.  These are from past Orientale Lumen Conferences and other Eastern Church events around the world.  There is no cost and all you need to do is register to watch.  There are several Introduction videos and Samplers that you can view even without registering.
We intend to produce more and more shows and make them available through this media, including un-published lectures of Metropolitan Kallistos, Archimandrite Robert Taft, and other renowned theologians.  We also hope to have some OLTV programs available in sample form on YouTube.  I hope these interest you.  Please take a look, and let me know what we can do to make them more widely available and more appealing.
If you would like to own these programs, or show them to your fellow parishoners, many of these programs are also available in audio CD and video DVD format for purchase from the OL Conference website’s online catalog.
For OLTV visit:  www.oltvweb.com
For OL Conferences visit:  www.olconference.com

Eastern Christian Publications
Our online catalog of printed material, www.https://ecpubs.com/, continues to grow with new titles in many categories.  A few new titles include:
* Image, Symbol and Mystery – the Eastern Church Sacraments
* Good News from the East – Volume III – homilies for the Liturgical Year
* I Am With You Always – pastoral letters of Patriarch Gregorios III
* Five Years Behind Barbed Wire – diary of a Hungarian Greek-Catholic priest
* The Holy Encounter – catechesis on the feast of the Presentation in the Temple
* Primer on Church and Eucharist – catechesis on the Divine Liturgy

Eastern Churches Journal
In an effort to “catch up” on our production schedule so that news in the Chronicle section is more relevant, we are combining our normal three separate books for Volume 13 and for Volume 14 into a single book for each year.  Volume 13 is at the printer and will be published in the next few weeks with Volume 14 shortly thereafter.  We also plan to produce the three books for Volume 15 by the end of the summer.  ECJ is published three times a year with articles about the Christian East – history, liturgy, theology, scripture, etc. – and also contains book reviews, a Q&A column, and an extensive Chronicle of the major events in all the Eastern Churches – Catholic and Orthodox – around the world.  If you do not subscribe, you can find more information and subscribe online at the ECJ button of the online catalog at www.https://ecpubs.com/.  I’m sure you will find the ECJ helpful to you and your parish.

Thanks for reading this long update.  I hope to see you in June at OL XIII!