A journalist and religious scholar who spent fifteen years inside the Moscow Patriarchate — and now documents its collaboration with state power and religious persecution in Russia.
Short. Sergei Chapnin is a Russian Orthodox journalist and scholar who has written on the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet period since 1990. He edited the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and taught theology at St Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow. Since 2022 he has been Director of Communications at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University. He is also a curator of exhibitions of contemporary Christian art.
Full. 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.
From the 1990s through the early 2000s, Chapnin covered Russian religious life for Kommersant and Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 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), and as Secretary of the Church, State, and Society Commission of the Inter-Conciliar Board (2010–2013). 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 written and spoken internationally on the Moscow Patriarchate’s role in Russian state power and the theological crisis this has produced. His work has appeared in First Things, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS, The Moscow Times, and other outlets. In 2022 he was appointed to the faculty of Fordham University.
Chapnin is also a photographer and curator of exhibitions on contemporary Christian art, presented in Europe, Russia, and the United States.
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