This episode of the Sumud Podcast features a wide ranging conversation with Mother Agapia on what she witnessed living and working in Palestine from the late 1990s through the Second Intifada and beyond. Dr. Ed Hasan and Mother Agapia trace how the promise of Oslo collapsed into deeper control, how settlements expanded while Palestinian life narrowed, and how walls, checkpoints, curfews, and violence reshaped daily existence. Through firsthand stories from Jerusalem and the West Bank, she challenges the framing of the crisis, rejects Christian Zionism as a distortion of Christianity, and describes the shared community life of Palestinian Muslims and Christians. The episode closes with reflections on Sumud as lived resilience and the moral responsibility of people in the United States to act.

Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos is a Greek American Orthodox nun in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. She moved to Jerusalem in 1996 and later helped lead and administer a girls’ school in the West Bank, where she witnessed the realities of occupation firsthand. Now based in New York, she continues her work through prayer, education, pilgrimages, and public advocacy for Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike.

In this conversation, we explore
What brought Mother Agapia to Jerusalem and the West Bank
Life inside the convent and beyond the walls
The girls’ school and daily life under occupation
Oslo, settlements, the wall, and the collapse of the “peace process”
Eyewitness accounts of violence and confinement
Christian Zionism and American political theology
Sumud, dignity, and why Palestinians remain rooted

Director: Dr. Ed Hasan | 2025