In this Issue:

• • The Liturgical Face of Philanthropy
  • Expanded Perspective: Compassionate Stewardship
  • 2025 Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Recipient
  • 2026 ECRF Schedule

By Hannah Grace Howard, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in UGA’s Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology

Within the international spiritual marketplace, it is perhaps an obvious truism that many religious organizations participate in, deeply care about, and are motivated by notions of charity. Whether dubbed charity, philanthropy, or mission work, various traditions around the globe concern themselves with welfare and emergency intervention through both large organizations and smaller parish-based associations.  

Within Orthodox Christianity specifically, the International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) organize an array of relief services for those in need. Given its global structure and thematic focus on emergency relief, the work of the IOCC fits rather neatly within a broader humanitarian system that incorporates much of both religious and secular aid. These global humanitarian logics are often replicated across space and differing traditions. However, in my anthropological work on Greek Orthodox charity in Athens, I have found that there are other aspects to charity that do not easily scale or replicate precisely because they cannot be fully understood through the lens of humanitarianism. While they may not scale, it is my contention that these smaller, more face-to-face, ritualized, and relationship-focused forms of aid are essential for the liturgical life of many communities.  

This modal distinction was first brought to my attention by a priest in Athens, Greece with whom I worked closely for over a year. From our very first interaction, it was exceptionally apparent to me just how involved this priest was in the daily reality of communal life at his parish. He was everywhere – in the cathedral, in the parish office, in the kitchen, in the streets. Over countless cups of coffee, he spoke to me about the importance of the Gospel, the Church’s responsibility to its community, and the shape of the liturgical life of both individuals and the Church writ large. He was an astute scholar of both scripture and ritual practice, as well as a wonderful storyteller.  

On one occasion, he began weaving together multiple New Testament parables and his own experiences as a longtime priest. As he did this, he explained that everything in these stories is an icon, just as how we live must be an icon. Everyone was always talking about icons in these conversations. I swirled my Greek coffee around gently, watching the grounds at the bottom of the small cup stir and then settle. The steady motion helped me think. I had been trying to get him to talk about the humanitarian mission of the Church of Greece and relate it to the wider aid network in Athens, and now here we were again talking about icons. His gaze returned to mine, and he smirked a little, in a way I had come to recognize – the smirk that told me he didn’t think I had quite understood his point. 

“Humanitarianism, solidarity, philanthropy – these are all just words. No one really understands what solidarity means and so it has become too complicated. And anyway, it’s not just solidarity that we’re doing. It’s liturgy. So you see, the liturgy on Sundays is not the only liturgy. We must also pull the liturgy into our lives. And this is why we do what we do.” I wanted to be sure I had heard correctly, even through the layers of translation happening in my head. “Wait, wait – perimene! – the work we do of feeding and clothing people is an icon of liturgy, it is like liturgy, or it is liturgy?” “It is liturgy, my child, naturally. It’s the work of the Church in the world,” he replied. 

From the moment that this priest helped me realize just how much the work of the Church diverged from typical humanitarian sentiments, I sought to understand what it might mean for charitable care to be liturgical and thus potentially sacramental. His words represent an undeniably theological claim with significant political consequences, and after spending so much time with the people who thought and acted liturgically, it is a claim I take quite seriously. Like other ethnographers of Orthodox societies, I saw my interlocutors’ lives – and thus their charity – as inseparable from the liturgical modalities and theological principles of community and self that the Church cultivates. 

The principles that guided this priest’s charitable work are given shape and a name specifically by the theologian Father Alexander Schmemann, who calls the work of the Church in the world “the liturgy after the liturgy.” In his treatises on liturgical and eucharistic theology, he argues that the Church operates as a mission in the world – that charity and care for others are direct extensions of the Eucharist itself. In other words, if the preparation and dispensation of the Eucharist, the holy gifts of bread and wine, brings a human into full personhood through their relationship with Christ, the experience of care brings them into full personhood through their relationship with others. This is a fundamentally different understanding of charity than one which relies on humanitarian principles of relieving suffering. Further, it is an understanding that urges us as scholars, practitioners, and people of faith to more deeply consider both the inspirations and the possible consequences of our charitable care. 

Ultimately, while large-scale systems of intervention highlight the humanitarian concerns of many Orthodox practitioners, they do little to illuminate these localized ways that such concerns are integrated into the wider ethos, theology, and praxis of specific groups on the ground. My work thus proposes a different paradigm of aid that operates under a logical framework distinct from the humanitarian logics that have guided many understandings of charity and instead engages with religious philanthropy as a key sacramental piece of liturgical practice. Many congregations looking to mobilize charity at the local scale thus might benefit from observing the ways in which philanthropic missions bring people together in meaningful ways and create linkages between charitable care work, ritual spaces, and communal salvation.  

Hannah Grace Howard is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology at the University of Georgia. Her work concerns the political and theological principles that guide Orthodox Christians’ community and self-making strategies in Athens, Greece. Her doctoral dissertation, completed at Boston University, specifically addressed this topic in the context of charitable care practices around the city.