Grant White, an Orthodox scholar and lecturer at the University of Joensuu in Finland:

"I wonder sometimes if actually the city doesn't become the new ascetic battleground for Christians in that it presents us with all the challenges of loving one's neighbour in the 21st century. You encounter the poor, you encounter great ugliness in the city, great noise, confusion, motion, agitation, but at the same time you can find great beauty, and not just in the occasional park that you find, or a flower growing unexpectedly out of the crack of a sidewalk, but you find it precisely in the places where people love each other, where homeless people are given help, given shelter, given food, given hope. Where human beings reach out to each other in love."