The Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University, in collaboration with the Department of Religious Education of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and with the blessing of His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros, is pleased to present the Speaker Series: Orthodox Scholars Preach.

Every week until Pascha, a different Orthodox Scholar will release a new video. This Series provides a platform for Orthodox scholars to reflect on the spiritual themes of each Sunday's liturgical calendar while drawing on their expertise.

This week's sermon for the Sunday of the Last Judgment features Dr. Lori Branch, associate professor of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Iowa. Her first book, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth, was named 2007 Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. She has published widely on literature, religion, and the postsecular, from the fourth-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers to seventeenth-century Dissent, contemporary Gothic novels, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Prior to the pandemic, she lectured in Los Angeles, Boston, Beijing, and Shanghai about postsecular studies, Wordsworth, and the Bible, and with her collaborator Mark Knight she co-taught two NEH Summer Seminars for faculty on religion, secularism, and the novel. She edits the monograph series “Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies” for Ohio State University Press and is currently at work on a book project titled Postsecular Reason: Beyond Coercion. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters, where they are members of St. Raphael Orthodox Church, a pan-Orthodox parish in the Antiochian Archdiocese, singing in the choir and helping with the education and spiritual growth program.