The potential of digital media to preserve and promote the cultural and spiritual heritage of the Orthodox Christian faith has sparked our interest and imagination here at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, and we invited the Virginia H. Farah Foundation to partner with us in an exciting, new project. We want to share the voices of illustrious teachers and brilliant theologians of the twentieth century by converting around 500 cassettes held in The Father Georges Florovsky Library on our campus to digital format, making their contents accessible and portable not only to a new generation but also to a global audience.

Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, cassettes of many class lectures, seminars, and institutes held on the campus of St. Vladimir's Seminary were often accessed by library patrons. However, as audio technology rapidly advanced and the public began to discard their cassette players, use of our library's cassette collection languished, and important voices once heard in the Orthodox Church were silenced.

We recognized our responsibility to preserve the valuable legacy contained in these cassettes—voices that illuminate important aspects, historical moments, and even spiritual movements of the Orthodox Christian faith in the twentieth century. These voices are not limited to seminary faculty; they include other luminaries who influenced church life, among them, clergy and lay people interested in education and church renewal. They include Orthodox Christians from around the world, who gathered on our campus to instruct people in the faith and to offer stimulating discussions.

We recognized that all these voices, as our Church's hymnography encourages, begged an opportunity once again "to go out into all the earth" (Psalms 19:4). They needed to be freely accessible, and, moreover, shared as extensively as possible.

We became aware of how valuable—and how in demand—these lost voices really were when a lone cassette containing the voice of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary from 1962-1983, was carefully converted to digital format with limited technology by seminary staff. It was posted on the Seminary's website December 13, 2013, in his memory, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Within 48 hours, the recording of his class lecture "Mary and the Church" had garnered more than 1,100 hits, demonstrating current wide interest in his words spoken more than 36 years ago.

The need—the yearning—to hear the voices of our fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters from the past became ever more evident to library staff, and they envisioned a way to respond to this apparent interest by using digital technology.

Funding from the Virginia H. Farah Foundation for this digitization project brought to life and light the voices of Orthodox Christian luminaries who had a significant spiritual and historic impact on twentieth-century church life, spreading their ever-relevant words "to the ends of the world" (Psalms 19:4). Moreover, the Foundation's funding for this initial project provided a solid basis for our library staff to build future digital collections—another important step in their continuing endeavor to keep pace with advancing technologies.

*NOTE: The quality of some recordings preserved on this site is not ideal due to the condition of source tapes as well as conditions and equipment used at the time of those recordings.