I found the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy podcast at a time when I was trying to discover what Orthodoxy was, how it differed from Catholicism, Protestantism, evangelicalism, and other Christian traditions. I found a wealth of information here. Father Andrew Stephen Damick knew more about my own faith tradition and where it came from than I did.

In my experience within evangelicalism, church history wasn’t a major focus of discussion or teaching. We tended to talk about Christ and the Apostles, maybe the earliest martyrs, and then pass over the next 1800 years until we arrived at Dwight L. Moody, A.B. Simpson, and others like them. So it was a real pleasure to learn from Fr. Andrew. I appreciated his accuracy and charity. Of course he was speaking from the perspective of an Orthodox priest, but he never strawmanned any of the other traditions. He always treated them with the utmost respect and never forgot to mention the best things about each of them.

It was clear from his lectures that he knew what he was talking about. After spending weeks listening to one podcast per night while washing the dishes, I came away convinced that a real argument can be made that Eastern Orthodoxy represents a continuity that goes closer to the time of the apostles and earliest church fathers than any other tradition. I also came away a bit stunned by how recent the origins of some of my own tradition’s beliefs and practices actually were. I would highly recommend this podcast series to anybody who is interested in church history from an Orthodox perspective.