About

We live in a moment that is, by most measures, the most hostile to religion in living memory. A lot of us grew up without much of any of it. A lot of us were told the faith of our families was something to outgrow. And yet, somewhere quietly underneath all of that, the ancient truth the Apostles taught is still here — still being lived, still being taught, still on offer to anyone who would walk back through the door.

If you grew up without religion, or with religion that drifted away from you, or simply with a vague sense that your grandparents believed something meaningful but you never quite knew what — this site is especially for you.

And what waits behind that door is older and wider than most of us were ever told. Paul wrote to the Ephesians that the household of God is "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone" (Ephesians 2:20). That is not a soft metaphor about spiritual continuity. It describes something that physically happened: twelve men walked out of Jerusalem in a dozen directions, and where they stopped they left churches behind — with named successors, and instructions for choosing the ones who came after.

Those churches are still here. Most of us have never heard of most of them.

Why "The Apostolic Root"

Ask most Christians where their church came from and the answer starts a few hundred years ago, with a man who had an opinion. Ask a Copt, an Armenian, a Malabar Indian, a Ruthenian — or a Roman Catholic — and you get something different: a name and a road. Mark came here. Thomas came here. Bartholomew came here.

Those roads lead back to the same place. The rites that grew along them look different from each other — different languages, different music, different ways of explaining the same mysteries — but they are branches, not separate trees. That shared root is what this site is named for, and it is the thing most of us were never told we had.

How this started

A few years ago, in the middle of a long season of church-hopping, a kind woman at one of the churches I was visiting told me I should read the Bible, starting with Romans. She said it would "get the Catholic out of me."

Fair enough, I thought. I hadn't picked up a Bible since my Sunday School days, more than twenty years earlier. So I did it. I read the whole thing. Then I read it again. I followed three different "Bible in a year" podcasts, listened to every theological podcast I could find, and visited every church I could get to.

The result was the opposite of what she had hoped. I came home — to the Byzantine Catholic tradition I had been raised in but never really seen, and then past it, to something much older and much larger than the version I had quietly left behind in college.

Another conversation pushed me the same way. My wife mentioned once that her family had always been Protestant, to which I cheekily replied that if you go back far enough they were Catholic first. I meant it as a throwaway retort, but it stuck with me — because it happens to be true. Somewhere in our shared history, every Christian in the Western world was Catholic. It is a legacy all of us share, whatever pew our parents and grandparents happened to sit in.

What the articles try to do

Lead with what Scripture actually says — read the way the apostolic Church read it. Draw on the long, continuous tradition of the apostolic churches when it illuminates something. Show the shared faith the ancient Christians held in the Church that Christ physically established. And answer the questions people actually have, like why do we die?

I write from the Ruthenian Byzantine tradition because it is the one I know from the inside, not because it is the only branch worth knowing. Where the Eastern view differs from more familiar Western framings, the goal is never to win an argument — it is to recover the older inheritance that all of us, somewhere in our family trees, came from.

"Show me where that is in the Bible"

A good deal of the work here is answering the tough questions modern Christians ask about the ancient faith — and some of the shortest articles take on one particular kind: the challenge that starts show me where that is in the Bible. Confession. The sign of the cross. Crucifixes. Mary's perpetual virginity. Practices that can look, to anyone raised on a simpler account of the faith, like later inventions bolted on.

Usually they aren't. Usually they are sitting in Scripture in plain sight, and the reason they look like additions is that we stopped reading the way the people who wrote them read. These pieces are filed under Show Me Where — short, most of them under five minutes, each taking a single practice and walking to chapter and verse. A few to start with:

• Where Did Christ Establish Confession?
• Where in the Bible is the Sign of the Cross?
• Why Do Catholics Have a Crucifix?

A note from the author

I'm not a theologian, a priest, or a scholar — I'm a software developer who was raised Byzantine Catholic in the Eparchy of Parma (Ruthenian tradition), drifted in college, and stumbled home in my thirties. The articles here are an attempt to write down what I was looking for, but couldn't easily find, when I was coming back.

Where to start

If you're new and don't know where to begin, the curated path is the Core Faith series — a structured walk through the foundations of the Byzantine Catholic tradition.

If you'd rather trace the root itself, The Church the Apostles Built follows all twelve out of Jerusalem and charts where the churches they founded stand today.

If you'd rather browse, the articles page lists everything and lets you filter by section or tag. The site also has an RSS feed.

Ready to visit a parish? Use the parish finder to locate a Byzantine Catholic church near you.

Thanks for reading. Welcome home.