Dr. David C. Ford, Professor of Church History at the Seminary, visited Buffalo over the weekend of March 3-5, 2017, at the invitation of the Council of Orthodox Christian Churches of the Niagara Frontier (COCCNF), headed by its new president, Fr. Jason Vansuch (STS 1999), pastor of St. George Orthodox Church (OCA) in Buffalo.  Dr. David led a retreat at St. George's on Saturday, on the theme of "The Spiritual Struggle in the Contemporary World."  During the retreat he shared a reflection he and his wife have written entitled "The Beauty of Holiness - An Orthodox Offering in Response to the Sexual Revolution of our Time."

 

On Sunday, during the Coffee Hour after the Divine Liturgy, Dr. David spoke on "Getting to Know the Saints Better," and shared a lengthy passage from his newly published translation of St. John Chrysostom's Letters to Saint Olympia, published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press in their Popular Patristics series.  Then that Sunday evening, after the Pan-Orthodox Vespers service held at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, where the head priest is Fr. Christos Christakis, Dr. David gave a presentation that included reading St. Tikhon of Moscow's homily for the Sunday of Orthodoxy which he preached in 1903 at his cathedral in San Francisco, as he was Archbishop of the Russian Missionary Archdiocese in America.  This homily appears in a book published by St. Tikhon's Monastery Press that came out last year, entitled Saint Tikhon of Moscow: Instructions and Teachings for the American Orthodox Faithful (1898 - 1907), which Dr. David helped to translate and edit. 

 

Saturday evening Dr. David had the pleasure of reconnecting with Stephen Gjurich, one of Fr. Jason's classmates in the Class of 1999 at the Seminary (see photo).  Stephen has been a teacher of English as a Second Language at the college level for 18 years now, while attending the Serbian Orthodox Church in Buffalo, and an ongoing donor to the seminary.