Fr. John evaluates the impact that the Christianization of Rome had on the state's conception of sacrifice.

Fr. John addresses the uncertainty in Byzantium following the death of Constantine and then the consolidation of Christianity shortly after that.

Fr. John discusses the life and activities of St. Pulcheria, as well as how the Trisagion came into Orthodox worship.

Fr. John discusses the importance of worship to Byzantium, the immense degree to which its culture was influenced by liturgy, and the significance of "facing East."

Fr. John discusses eucharistic worship as an experience of paradise.

Fr. John looks at traditional Christianity's eucharistic rites in order to see how they served to reorient the world toward the kingdom of heaven.

Fr. John discusses the design, history, and importance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Fr. John explores what exactly monasticim was in the days of St. Macarius.

Fr. John explores marriage within the life of early Christendom.

Fr. John explores the triumph of Orthodoxy in the year 843 and the way in which it enables the art of Christendom to express the deepest conviction about man's relationship with God and the possibility of communion with Him.

Fr. John discusses the ways in which iconography was defined and produced in Byzantine Christendom.

Fr. John introduces the principle of heavenly orientation and then explores actual forms of art, beginning with iconography.

Fr. John explores specific examples of icons and the way in which they manifested early Christendom's experience of the kingdom of heaven.

Fr. John explores traditional Christian temple or church architecture and locates the principle of heavenly orientation at work.

Fr. John continues his discussion of traditional Christian architecture.

Fr. John discusses the development of Christian hymnography.

Fr. John looks at some of the actual texts of early Christian hymns and the way in which they gave expression to the vision of early Christendom.

Fr. John looks at a couple of consequences of St. Augustine's anthropology in the West.

Fr. John describes the desanctification of the world that began to occur in the time leading up to the Great Schism.

Fr. John looks at the development that took place within the Frankish lands themselves, especially those concerning the liturgy.

Fr. John examines the tendency toward eucharistic piety in Frankish Christendom.

Fr. John discusses the baptism of Saint Vladimir and shares an introductory anecdote about the death and canonization of Saints Boris and Gleb.

In the anecdotal introduction to a new reflection, Fr. John tells the story of the fall of Constantinople to the western crusaders in 1204, showing how this event, inspired in part by new claims of papal supremacy, resulted in the permanent separation of eastern and western Christendom.

In this episode, Fr. John discusses the immediate aftermath of the mutual excommunications of 1054 and the ways in which papal supremacy emerged as the main point of continued division between the east and the west.

In this episode, Fr. John discusses the coming of the crusades and the decisive role played by Pope Gregory VII.

In this final episode of Reflection 15, Fr. John discusses the thirteenth-century popes Innocent III and Gregory IX, showing the close connection between their efforts to advance papal supremacy on the one hand and direct crusades against the Orthodox on the other. He concludes the reflection by noting the recent meeting of Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew and placing it within the context of centuries of cultural division between east and west.

Fr. John addresses the foundations in the West of a growing pessimism about man's condition, paying particular attention to Augustine.

Fr. John discusses the Christian statecraft of early Christian Russia.

After a transition to his new parish assignment, Father John returns to the podcast with a discussion of the atmosphere of catastrophe that hung over the old Christendom of the east as the Muslim Turks advanced on Byzantium, while a defender of traditional Christianity, Saint Mark of Ephesus, prepared to depart for the unionist Council of Florence in the west.

In this episode, Fr. John describes why Saint Gregory's defense of hesychasm against the westernized Barlaam represented a defense not only of Orthodoxy, but of Christendom itself.

Fr. John draws attention to a feature of Byzantine statecraft in which the Emperor persecuted and manipulated the leadership of the Church.

In this episode, Fr. John discusses Pope Urban II's calling of the First Crusade and the impact it and the crusades of the twelfth century had upon relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholics.

Fr. John discusses the rise of the Franks in Western Christianity.

Fr. John gives an account of the atmosphere in Italy in which Orthodox and Roman Catholic delegates met to discuss the possibility of union in the middle of the fifteenth century. Only one of the Orthodox would refuse to sign the resulting Treaty of Union, Saint Mark of Ephesus.

In this final episode of Reflection 17, Fr. John relates the final catastrophe to befall eastern Christendom during the period, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

Having related the fall of Byzantium to the Turks, Fr. John now begins a reflection on the only remaining Orthodox state in eastern Christendom, Muscovite Russia. In this introductory anecdote he tells of an event in the history of this "Third Rome" that signaled the coming decline of ecclesio-political symphony, and with it the experience of paradise.

In this episode Father John describes the rise of the Muscovite state within Russian Christendom, and the way its Orthodox leaders began to see themselves as heirs to the fallen Byzantine Empire.

In this final episode of his reflection on Muscovite Russia, Fr. John describes the Old Believer Schism as a crisis in the formerly optimistic cosmology of eastern Christendom, leading to its decline on the eve of modern times.

In this episode, Fr. John discusses ways in which papal supremacy led to the growing sense of crisis that preceded the Protestant Reformation.

In this latest episode on the impending Protestant Reformation, Fr. John discusses ways in which the long legacy of pessimism about the human condition and the world in general undermined western Christendom at one of her most critical moments.

In this episode, Father John continues his discussion of developments that led to the Protestant Reformation, emphasizing doctrines and practices related to human salvation.

In this episode Father John concludes his reflection on the critical state of western Christendom on the eve of modern times, exploring how the Reformation tried to resolve the issue of anthropological pessimism but ironically served to intensify it.

In this anecdotal introduction to the final reflection of Part 2 of the podcast, Father John relates the extraordinary story of a Reformation-era town that declared itself the kingdom of Christ on earth, a "New Jerusalem." Expressing a profound absence of God in the world, however, the story of Reformation Muenster was in fact a sign of the fall of a Christendom centered upon the experience of paradise.

In this episode Fr. John explores the life of Protestant father John Calvin and the reformer's contribution to the Reformation project.

In this episode Father John discusses a few tendencies in Calvinism that would serve to undermine the place of paradise in Reformation Christendom, especially the doctrine of "total depravity" and the spiritual anxiety that accompanied it.

Fr. John discusses the dignity of man according to the Greek Fathers

In the first episode of part two of his four-part podcast "Paradise and Utopia," Fr. John Strickland, a professor of history at Saint Katherine Orthodox College, describes how Pope Nicholas I paved the way for the rapid development of the papal theory of empire.

Fr. John contends that to understand the coming of the Renaissance and its humanism, one really needs to understand how in the West the doctrines about man became increasingly pessimistic.

In this episode Fr. John discusses ways in which Reformed cosmology represented a shift from the heavenly immanence of paradisiacal Christendom toward the heavenly transcendence of utopian Christendom.

In this episode Fr. John discusses Reformed attitudes toward worship, and the ways in which western Christendom's liturgical and sacramental foundations were eroded when they were put into practice.