OTIUM Travel
War, Peace, Liturgy
Dates: May 8-10, 2026
Venue: Belgrade, Serbia
Lecturer: Pavel Shchelin
Number of participants: 24
The workshop will consist of lectures, discussions, essay discussions, and excursions.
Before the workshop, participants will be required to write an essay on the assigned topic.
To register, please fill out the form
ABSTRACT
When the historical ground slips from under our feet, when our vision is overwhelmed by news sensations, when hypocrisy and lukewarmness have become a way of life, the phenomenon of war becomes the "moment of truth." Today, war exposes the lie of "universal values" and testifies to the collapse of the idol of international law.
Under these circumstances, every person once again faces a choice: either fall into the despair of nihilism, or find firm ground in that which does not fit the Procrustean bed of the proud mind, but rather transforms it and provides a lens through which events can be seen in the color of Eternity.
I'm talking about Liturgy. In this seminar, we'll explore the connection between the concepts of "War, Peace, Power, Sacrifice, Desire, Will, Reason, Compromise, Faith," a connection that, in my educational experience, I long obscured behind Kantian dogmas. Every day will reveal unnoticed parallels between Liturgy and War, where the former is the only way out of the trap of the latter, and the latter is the only just price for refusing to follow the path of the former.
The seminar will be based on, but not limited to, the patristic tradition. We will see how every culture, from Homer's Iliad to Donald Trump's Twitter, offers a different solution to the fundamental question of war and liturgy.
I hope our meeting will help both the author and the guests understand new facets of how modern upheavals paradoxically return us to the forgotten ontology of the Eucharist, where true peace is the overcoming of the war of a fallen world in transformation, rather than wandering through a labyrinth of compromises and dead ends of false agreements between hating wills.
