“It was fun and games, but it wasn’t church,” Dorta, 20, said in the foyer of St. Philip Antiochian Orthodox Church in Davie as incense and ancient hymns filled the air. “I like more discipline.”

That solid feel, of clinging to truth in a trend-driven world, is what helps the church keep about 75 percent of its young people attending, according to Bishop Antoun of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.

“People today are thirsty and hungry to know the truth,” Antoun said after a Holy Week service this week at St. Philip’s. “Faith and truth — that’s what lasts.”

Antoun, whose Diocese of Miami and the Southeast covers nine states, has been in South Florida on a round of services.

On Wednesday, he anointed people with oil and wine at St. Philip’s. On Thursday night, he led a procession around St. Mary parish in West Palm Beach during the Twelve Gospel Readings of the Passion of Christ. The bishop returned to St. Philip’s on Friday for the Funeral and Burial Service of Jesus Christ. And tonight, he’ll lead the Resurrectional Service at 10 p.m. at St. George Cathedral in Coral Gables.

The Antiochians are part of the Eastern Orthodox Communion, which includes Greek, Russian and Ukrainian groups. The Orthodox pride themselves on keeping the old-time religion from the oldest times. They still uphold the teachings of the first seven church councils, which ended in the eighth century, before the Eastern and Western churches parted ways.

One such point is the date of Easter, which they’re celebrating more than three weeks after their Catholic and Protestant brethren. The Orthodox keep the original standard to observe Easter after Passover, a rule dropped by Western churches in the 16th century.

Most Antiochian Christians are ethnically Syrian and Lebanese, and a few of the prayers are said in Arabic. But the church is rapidly Americanizing and has drawn thousands of converts from Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal and other churches.

Antoun, 77, is the senior among the six Antiochian bishops of Canada and the United States, where a half-million Antiochians live. They’re increasing by a thousand or more per year — sometimes by whole congregations, he said.

“They’re all just looking for the full truth of the church,” the bishop said. “They decided to return to the New Testament religion.

“The church also has made some practical moves, he said. The church runs a camp, school, museum and library on 403 acres in Ligonier, Penn. It all amounts to a lasting home for young people, like Cory Dorta.

“I don’t understand why so many churches preach different messages,” he said. “Other churches base their beliefs on the Bible. But the Orthodox Church made the Bible.

The Building Bridges Seminar is a unique annual series which brings together a range of internationally recognized Christian and Muslim scholars for an intensive study of relevant Biblical and Qur’anic texts.

The seminar, which is organized in partnership with Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., will run from May 6-8. “Communicating the Word: Revelation, Translation and Interpretation in Christianity and Islam,” builds on similar events in London, Doha, Sarajevo, Washington, D.C., and Singapore.

On May 7, Williams will preach and preside at a service for the Inauguration of his new Representative to the Holy See and director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, the Rev. David Richardson.

Williams sets out a fresh and original vision of how religious tradition — Christianity in particular — can help ground human rights thinking in ways that protect human life from violence, abuse or inequality.

Williams responded specifically to the challenge laid down by Alastair McIntyre to find a language, or ethics, for human rights which is robust enough to resist moral relativism on the one hand and political utility on the other.

If McIntyre was right to say that the problem with the strict Enlightenment framework of human rights is that it leaves us ‘bereaved,’ what might religion have to say about the ‘most secure foundations’ for a universal ethic of inalienable rights? In answering this question, Williams shows how theology can come to the aid of social, political and legal theory.

Human rights cannot be allowed to become just a list of entitlements “dropped into the cradle,” he says. “If human rights theory is to be robust enough to rank as ‘the only generally intelligible way in modern political ethics of decisively challenging the positive authority of the State to do what it pleases,’ it needs to be rooted more deeply than is possible within a purely secular rationale.”

Using the development of Christian thinking about slavery as an example, Williams explores how the notion of bodiliness could be a key to a deeper rooting of the notion of inalienable human rights and how “my rights and yours are inextricably linked: ‘my liberty not to be silenced, not to have my body reduced to someone else’s instrument, is nourished by the equal liberty of the other not to be silenced’.”

“Equal liberty is at root inseparable from the equality of being embodied,” he says. “Rights belong not to the person who can demonstrate capacity or rationality but to any organism that can be recognized as a human body, at any stage of its organic development.”

The full text of the lecture is available here.