Alexis Trader

Father Alexis Karakallinos, né John F. Trader, is an Orthodox Christian priest and monk who was born in Dover, Delaware, and has lived in Greece since 1996. By far, his most important work is Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy: A Meeting of Minds. It was written over a period of years in order to demonstrate how Christian teachings can not only inform, but also provide depth and direction to contemporary approaches to help those who suffer with a variety of psychological problems. It also aims to provide pastors with supplemental tools for guiding those whose striving for sanctification is challenged by unresolved psychological difficulties. It's an attempt to find a meeting place between mind and heart, theory and practice, as well as modernity and antiquity, that can provide solace for the suffering and hope for the discouraged.

Grandson of a methodist minister and raised in pious Protestant household, Father Alexis has always been concerned about living the Christian faith as a Christ-centered way of life. After some religious searching in college and graduate school, he found preserved and treasured in the Holy Orthodox Church an entryway into the "theanthropic" life of Christ--i.e. the possibility of living a life infused with divine light, of an "interpenetration" of humanity and divinity--where through repentance the believer can participate in Christ's truth, virtue, and holiness. Desiring to live the Orthodox Christian Faith as fully and radically as possible, in 1988 he entered the Monastery of Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk in Eastern Pennsylvania, and he taught courses in patristics, the spiritual life, and the order of Divine Services in the Orthodox Seminary adjacent to the monastery. In 1996, he went to the Monastery of Karakallou on the Holy Mountain of Athos, located on a remote pennisula jutting into the Aegean Sea, where he worked in the kitchen and was later ordained to the diaconate, the priesthood, and eventually made a father confessor. In 2005, he became the serving priest at a dependency of Karakallou, the Monastery of Saint Demetrios, Nea Kerdyllia, Greece. It is situated high on a hilltop overlooking the Aegean towards Mt Athos, a pastoral place where shepherds can often be seen passing by with their flocks and visitors can where visitors can see the restoration of an ancient Byzantine church, where Liturgies were celebrated clandestinely during the Ottoman occupation.

He began his education studing Chemistry and religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College (BA), Divinity at the University of Chicago (MA), and Orthodox theology at Saint Tikhon's Theological Seminary (MDiv), and he completed his studies in theology at the University of Thessaloniki (PhD). In addition to his own published works, he has also translated a number of books including: Anestis Keselopoulos's Passions and Virtues According to Saint Gregory Palamas (2004), John Romanides's Patristic Theology (2008) Dionysios Farasiotis's The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios (2008), and Elder Isaac's Elder Paisios of Mount Athos (2012). He has also written the foreword to Greece's Dostoevsky: The Theological Vision of Alexandros Papadiamandis (2011).