A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

SA

 

People Directory

John Alexander Vidović

John Vidovic is a young musician and composer whose talents, work with students, and presence in various musical circles have already created a significant community impact. Mr. Vidovic specializes in classical guitar, music theory and composition. He has been playing guitar for 13 years and has accumulated 11 years of experience as a self-taught pianist.

John studied guitar with Michael McChesney and Barrios scholar Richard Stover, as well as voice with Christopher Bengochea. He graduated from UCLA with a BA in music composition. As a composer, he has 9 years of experience in composition ranging from solo works to large ensembles, including chorus, wind ensemble and orchestra. He has also conducted original choral composition under the direction of Maestro Donald Neuen with the UCLA Chamber Singers in Royce Hall in June 2011. Mr. Vidovic composed choral works for the West Valley College Chamber singers performed at the Finale concerts in May 2009 and December 2011. His main influences include music from Latin America, Romantic era music, and folk music from Eastern Europe.

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Publishing

My Brother's Keeper

by Fr. Radovan Bigovic

Rare are the books of Orthodox Christian authors that deal with the subject of politics in a comprehensive way. It is taken for granted that politics has to do with the secularized (legal) protection of human rights (a reproduction of the philosophy of the Enlightenment), within the political system of so-called "representative democracy", which is limited mostly to social utility or to the conventional rules of human relations. Most Christians look at politics and democracy as unrelated with their experience of the Church herself, which abides both in history and in the Kingdom, the eschaton. Today, the commercialization of politics—its submission to the laws of publicity and the brainwashing of the masses—has literally abolished the "representative" parliamentary system. So, why bother with politics when every citizen of so-called developed societies has a direct everyday experience of the rapid decline and alienation of the fundamental aspects of modernity?

In the Orthodox milieu, Christos Yannaras has highlighted the conception of the social and political event that is borne by the Orthodox ecclesiastical tradition, which entails a personalistic (assumes an infinite value of the human person as opposed to Western utilitarian individualism) and relational approach. Fr Radovan Bigovic follows this approach. In this book, the reader will find a faithful engagement with the liturgical and patristic traditions, with contemporary thinkers, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, all in conversation with political science and philosophy. As an excellent Orthodox theologian and a proponent of dialogue, rooted in the catholic (holistic) being of the Orthodox Church and of his Serbian people, Fr Radovan offers a methodology that encompasses the above-mentioned concerns and quests.