Ancient Christian Witness

This magazine was inspired by the works of Ft. Seraphim Rose . When he died a group of younger monks of the brotherhood wanted to get his works in the hands of the punk and rock youth. So they started an add in a Rock magazine, the magazine wouldn't accept their add so they came up with the "zine" "Death to the World" in order to advertise in secular rock and punk magazines. It is now under the control of a group of young punks that became Orthodox.

I was just in a deep conversation about this zine, with someone of the punk world. And in our conversation she wanted to dig up some of the dirt that some may not know about.....in regards to the foundation of this Zine, and some of the people behind it.

Well, lets just say we got into a little disagreement about the "facts". She wanted to jump to conclusions about certain people I thought wasn't warrented. It's good to let the truth be known about a group or individual, but it must be done in a fair and balanced way.

You don't want to do it with an Axe to grind, and I thought that's what this person was doing. You don't want to state something that goes far beyond the evidence will allow. And if you are going to state it anyway then the right thing to do is to let people know that you are "speculating". For if you don't tell people your speculations then they are more likely to believe your assumptions as facts. And this is how false rumers & slander spread. Well, because of my caution, this person is now mad at me, and they feel that I am being stuck in my ways.

They know I hold Ft. Seraphim Rose in high regard, and they feel that because of that I don't want to know anything negative about the person. That is far from the truth. Now I don't believe everything Ft. Seraphim Rose believed, and I am willing to accept any flaws he may have had, but I am unwilling to believe something "where there is no evidence".

The sources that the person gave me was saying something completely different than what my friend was saying. And when I pointed it out to her she was upset. And she was upset with me for not going beyond what the evidence allowed.

It seems that most of the dirt...if not all of it....is with Ft. Herman, not Ft. Seraphim Rose

Hopefully we both will be able to get over this slight disagreement about the background of DTTW. But more importantly we should be fair, honest, and balanced about what the evidence actually says.

These are some of the links to death to the World.

From a reporter: It doesn't really talk much about the magazine, but it does focus on the group that started the magazine:

Orthowiki:

Articles from past issues:

A site about Ft. Seraphim Rose

Ft. Seraphim was from the HARDCORE ROCOR jurisdiction of Eastern Orthodoxy, therefore his views may seem ultra-conservative/traditional to some. This context should be kepted in mind when reading the works of Ft. Seraphim. I know that some Roman Catholics might be offended by some of his statements, but they should understand it in that context.

And these are the modern people over "Death to the World"

and

JNORM888