March 6, 2026, Monk Arsenije, Abbot of the Serbian Orthodox Monastery Ss Peter and Paul in Ribnica in Pastric, Serbia, gives a talk on Challenges facing Orthodox Christians in the Modern World.
Monk Arsenije, civil name Aleksandar Jovanović, was born in Belgrade in 1960 to parents of educators, medical professionals. In his hometown, he finished elementary school, the Third Belgrade High School. Since childhood, he has been constantly engaged in drawing, ceramics and sculpture. During his studies, he enrolled and attended school in Šumatovačkoi street, in the department of sculpture, with professor Vava Stanković, then president of ULUS.
He also attended a junior music school, the piano department, but soon left it. He remains forever a lover of the keyboard. From the age of twenty-four, he began to teach himself to handcraft fashion footwear, mostly snakeskin boots, which are bought and worn on the Belgrade rock scene. He participated for a short time, as a backing vocalist, in the group “Via Talas”, with bassist Bojan Pečar, later a member of EKV, and Misko Plavi, a former member of many Belgrade rock bands, today a well-known accordion soloist.
At the age of twenty-seven, he graduated from the Faculty of Dentistry in Belgrade. He refused Professor Stanković’s offer to study sculpture and, with a group of musician and artist friends, left for America before the war in Yugoslavia. He settles in New York, where he decides not to be a dentist and dedicates himself to art. He was engaged in textile design, decorative painting, tempera and applied sculpture.
However, he does not manage to make a more prominent presence on the New York scene, because he had to do more menial jobs to survive in the big city. Since he has always searched for a deeper meaning of life and truth, he has been practicing meditation and Zen Buddhism since his early youth, until finally, in Manhattan, he discovers Orthodoxy and returns to the faith of his ancestors. After returning to Orthodoxy, he met the academic painter and icon painter from Brazil Daniel Bren, who studied icon painting at the famous school for Russian Byzantine icon painting in Paris, under the famous iconographer and theoretician Leonid Uspensky. Mr. Breno becomes Alexander’s teacher of iconography.
Monastic life
Thanks to a radical change in spiritual and artistic expression, Alexander becomes an Orthodox icon painter. In 1991, Alexander finally decided to leave the world and dedicate himself to the monastic life, as a novice in the Russian-American monastery of St. Tikhon of Zadonsky in Pennsylvania. There he dedicates himself even more to prayer and icon painting.
After a year and a half, he decides to return to the old continent and joins the Visoki Dečani monastery in Kosovo and Metohija. There, in 1994, he received monastic vows and became a monk of Arsenija. After a few years, he founded the Dečan iconographic studio and school.
He continues his personal spiritual development in the Visoki dečani monastery. He teaches icon painting and gilding to the Dečan brothers, like other monks and civilians. Also, he studied Serbian church singing, as well as Byzantine melos, and became a leading singer. After twelve years, he received the blessing to retire to a hermitage and spend five years in solitude, in the mountain above the Crna Reka monastery, in Kolašin, Ibar.
All this time he paints icons and makes a living from it. He writes the book God and Rock and Roll, which achieves notable success. Due to poor health, he left the desert and went to Montenegro, where in 2011 he became a brother in the Ostrog monastery. There he founded his studio again and now, after two decades, he returns to original painting and sculpture. The monk Arseniia calls his new opus New Byzantium, and the stylistic expression itself is “iconographic surreal symbolism”.
In Montenegro, he works on the church radio “Svetigora”, where he hosts three original shows, and in Ostrog he founded the Ostroški TV studio and the show “Ostroški Svetionik”. With the blessing of Metropolitan Amfilohi, he began to deal with the spiritual leadership of the faithful and Orthodox
Source: Monastery Ribnica
