I don't know how to translate church terminology, but this piece on Rambler.ru (in Russian) really cracked us up yesterday, so I'll just sort of retell it.

It's a story about the Russian Orthodox Church holiday that they celebrated this past Friday here - the Apple Spas (a folk name for the holiday; the official church one is different - Prazdnik Preobrazheniya Gospodnya, but I don't have the vocabulary to translate it).

In the second paragraph there's a summary of the biblical story on which the holiday's based: Prophet Moses and Prophet Elijah descend to Christ and talk to him, and then there's a voice from the cloud above them, the voice of God, declaring Christ to be God's beloved son everyone should obey. Then comes this sentence:

The apostles who heard it fell to the ground in fear, RIA Novosti reports.

***

This, of course, reminds me of my very favorite University of Iowa School of Journalism professor, Steve Bloom.

Here's a passage about him from a Salon.com review of his book, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America:

A secular Jew who had lived most of his life in urban centers of the East and West Coast, Bloom writes that he felt isolated after his first few years in the heart of Christian America. His son's Cub Scout leader talks unthinkingly about Jesus, and the Easter Sunday headline of the Cedar Rapids Gazette reads: "He Has Risen." (Bloom jokes that this "broke all the rules of news judgment that I preached to my journalism students. The event was neither breaking news nor could it be corroborated by two independent sources.")