Statistics and A Few Thoughts

As the New Year continues I've begun checking this blog's stats. The first time I checked them out I was struck by the range of countries represented in the Fourth Rome's readership and that's got me checking them regularly. (In all honesty, that and my vanity keep me checking :-).) In the last 30 days alone readers from Eastern Europe (Macedonia, Romania, Russia, et cetera), North America (Canada and the USA), Asia and Oceania (primarily Australia, Georgia, and India), and Western Europe (Denmark, Germany, and the UK for the most part) have checked in!

It's both a personal delight to see such a diverse spread of countries in the blog statistics and a strong motivator for me to do better at providing news from throughout the Orthodox Christian world and not just 'this country here' or 'that country there.' If you have any suggestions for how I could make this blog better or any good Orthodox news sites (regardless of language) to refer me to, then please leave them here in the comments.

I hope this finds you well wherever you are throughout the world! God help us all as we begin preparing for the Great and Holy Fast and our Lord's glorious Resurrection.

Pictured is the Tsar Bell of Addis Abeba's Cathedral of St. George. It's a good reminder of the many and oftentimes random bonds that unite the Orthodox world - a bell given by the pro-Chalcedon Russians to the anti-Chalcedon Ethiopians, who themselves indirectly gave Russia its greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin.