‘Spiritual Guidance on Mount Athos’ will be the theme of a conference organized by the Friends of Mount Athos at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, UK from 8 to 10 March 2013.
“Spiritual guidance is the real business of Mount Athos, the principal service that the Fathers offer to each other and to the world”, comments FOMA’s Honorary Secretary, Dr Graham Speake. “Athonites have proffered spiritual guidance for more than 1000 years and continue to attract disciples and pilgrims to listen to what they have to say. Papers given at the conference will examine the many aspects of this venerable tradition.”
Speakers at the conference are all experts on their chosen themes but keen to make their subject accessible to a wide audience. Metropolitan Kallistos, FOMA’s President, will open the conference with a presentation on ‘Spiritual Guidance in the 18th Century’ . The next two papers will have a Russian flavour. Russian-born Sister Seraphima, an Oxford academic and nun at the Tolleshunt Knights monastery in Essex, will speak on ‘The Athonite Tradition of Spiritual Fatherhood from St Gregory Palamas to Father Sophrony Sakharov’. She will be followed by twin brothers, Fathers Kirill and Methody from St Petersburg, presenting a joint paper on ‘Spiritual Guidance in Mount Athos and Russia and the Theological Notion of the Person’.
Sister Theoktisti, an English monastic now with the Monastery of St John the Forerunner near Larissa in Greece, will look at ‘The Renewal of Women’s Monasticism in the 20th Century through the Guidance of Athonite Monks’.
The paper of an English priest-monk from Mount Athos on ‘Athonite Spiritual Guidance in the Tradition of Elder Joseph the Hesychast’ will be read on his behalf. Father Andreas Andreopoulos will round off proceedings with a paper on ‘The Challenges of Spiritual Guidance in Modern Greece.’
One further speaker has yet to be announced.
The conference costs £270 per person (£135 students) or £130 non-resident (£65 students).
The Friends of Mount Athos was formed in 1990 among those who share a common interest in the wellbeing of the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos. Its President and the Chairman of its Executive Committee is Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia.
The Speakers
Metropolitan Kallistos holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford where from 1966 to 2001 he was a Fellow of Pembroke College and Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies. He is a monk of the monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos, and an assistant bishop in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. In 2007 he was raised to the rank of metropolitan. His publications include The Orthodox Church (2nd edn, 1993) and The Orthodox Way (2nd edn, 1995) and he is co-translator of the five-volume Philokalia.
Sister Seraphima studied modern languages at Cambridge, theology in Paris, and classics in London before gaining a doctorate in theology and cultural history from Oxford in 2006. She is currently British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Oriental Institute at Oxford and a Research Fellow of Christ Church. Her publications include Evagrius Ponticus: The Making of a Gnostic (2011). She is a nun of the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, Essex.
Hieromonks Methody and Kirill were born in St Petersburg in 1969 and graduated from St Petersburg Technical University in 1992. Having experienced what they describe as ‘a dramatic shift in our worldview due to the crash of the communist system, the works of Feodor Dostoevsky, and an encounter with our spiritual father’, they entered St Petersburg Theological Seminary and Academy in 1995, took monastic vows in 1999, and were ordained priests in 2002. Since then they have been lecturing in Dogmatic Theology and Patristics and are currently preparing doctoral theses in theology.
Hieromonk Philotheos was born and educated in Oxford before moving to Mount Athos. He is a member of the brotherhood of St Andrew’s Skete in Karyes.
Sister Theoktisti is also English-born and studied PPP at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She then taught in London before moving to study in Germany and then on to a doctorate at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome. It was there that she discovered her spiritual roots in Orthodoxy and especially in monastic life. She is now a nun of the Holy Monastery of St John the Forerunner, Anatoli, Greece.
Deacon Andreas Andreopoulos was born and bred in Greece and studied psychology, sociology, and theology in Greece, Canada, the UK, and the USA.He is now Reader in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Winchester and was ordained deacon in 2012. His publications include This is my Beloved Son: The Transfiguration of Christ (2012), The Sign of the Cross: The Gesture, the Mystery, the History (2006), and Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (2005).