Dear Mr. [John] Dunlop,

Christ is risen!

I pray this finds you well and in the grace of our dear Saviour. Actually, I’ve been meaning to write you for some time, but the pressure of work never seems to give me a minute. Even this will just be a note concerning one practical question, and everything else will have to be once again postponed. But so that you will at least have some idea what is on our mind — we would like somehow to encourage or enlist a gathering of the talents and minds for the better propagation of genuine Orthodoxy in English: i.e., not just the collection of translators and translations, but perhaps some kind of consensus on what should be printed, and how, given the resources we have — the printing establishments of Orthodox Life, Orthodox Christian Witness, Orthodox Word. Well, perhaps what I’m saying is coming over foggily, but if you see what I’m trying to get at, perhaps you could make a comment or two.

Your study on the Moscow Patriarchate is an extremely good example of one kind of thing that is needed today, and one could only wish for it a wider circulation and a more permanent format — as a regular book.

But to get to the point of this letter: From your quotations from the two articles by Talantov (“Sergievshchina” and “The Secret Participation of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Struggle of the CPSU…”), it appears that these are by far the most interesting and profound of the documents to come out of the USSR in the last decade. But in “Patriarch and Prophets” there are only a few brief excerpts from both. Is Bourdeaux planning to print them elsewhere? And in any case, do you have the complete manuscripts, either in Russian or English, and if so is it possible for us to obtain a copy of them from you? And if they can be obtained only from Bourdeaux himself, do you have his address?

As you can see, we are very interested in printing one or both of them ourselves, perhaps in their entirety (depending on length). Our present Orthodox Word has an article in Talantovs memory, mostly taken from his own writings. But these two articles would be first-class documents in themselves.

We will be most eager to hear from you.

With love in Christ our Saviour,
Seraphim, Monk