About
Sergei Chapnin is a journalist, religious scholar, and editor engaged in critical analysis of the Russian Orthodox Church and post-Soviet authoritarianism. He serves as Director of Communications at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University, and as Chief Editor of The Gifts (Дары), an almanac of contemporary Christian culture. He is also an editor of Public Orthodoxy, a platform for theological and political analysis in the Orthodox Christian tradition.
Chapnin's work sits at the intersection of theology, history, political science, religious studies, and cultural analysis. His primary focus is the Russian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox churches across the post-Soviet space, and churches of the Russian tradition in diaspora. He examines their ecclesiology, their entanglement with state power, and the theological and ethical questions this raises for Orthodox Christians today.
From the 1990s through the early 2000s, Chapnin worked as a journalist covering Russian religious life for Kommersant and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, among Russia's leading independent newspapers. In 2001, at the invitation of Patriarch Alexei II, he joined the Moscow Patriarchate, where he served as Executive Editor of The Church Herald, Executive Editor of The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, and Deputy Chief Editor of the Moscow Patriarchate Publishing House (2009–2015). In 2010–2013, he served as Secretary of the Church, State, and Society Commission of the Inter-Conciliar Board of the Russian Orthodox Church. During this period, he was also a senior lecturer at Saint Tikhon Orthodox Humanitarian University, Faculty of Theology.
In December 2015, following a lecture at the Carnegie Moscow Center where he forecast that the war in Ukraine would be given religious justification, Chapnin was dismissed from all positions by Patriarch Kirill. Since then, he has become one of the most prominent Orthodox voices internationally in critical analysis of the Moscow Patriarchate's role in Russian state power and its theological crisis. His scholarship and journalism have appeared in First Things, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS, The Moscow Times, and other major outlets. In 2022, he was appointed to the faculty of Fordham University.
Beyond scholarship and writing, Chapnin is an accomplished photographer and curator of exhibitions on contemporary Christian art. His photographic work documents churches, monastic communities, places of pilgrimage, and human encounters within religious spaces. His curatorial projects have been presented in Europe, Russia, and the United States, bringing together contemporary iconographers, artists, and theologians in critical dialogue about faith, tradition, beauty, and the witness of the Church in our time.