About The Daily Podvig

Ulterior Motives

Humor blog and content marketing

First off, about the name, The Daily Podvig. “Podvig” is an untranslatable Russian word that could mean “task” or “spiritual struggle,” or “thing you have to get over.” It appears in spiritual texts to refer to a task that makes you go “ugh” when you think about it but does benefit you spiritually if you do it. To name a news publication “The Daily Podvig,” is pretty silly, which is kind of the point here. This is a humor site. If you ended up here looking for real information about the word “Podvig,” you might try this page at orthodoxinfo.com. 

You may be wondering who it was who thought a page with jokes about Eastern Orthodox Christians would be funny. Well, that’s me, Eric Thomas Ruthford, editor of The Daily Podvig. I live in the Seattle area and have been attending an Orthodox church for about 20 years.

I’m not a member of the clergy at any level, and the views on this site do not represent any organization within the Orthodox Church, although I may occasionally poke fun at them.

In my career, I’ve been a newspaper reporter for real newspapers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which closed in 2009. I’ve also been a Peace Corps volunteer, the finance manager of a homeless shelter, and I was an occasional contributor to The Onion Dome, an Orthodox humor site that used to create similar fake news articles. Also, I’m a new novelist, getting ready to release my new novel, Voice in the Storm, in 2022.

That novel is my secret way of trying to make money with this web site. If I make enough funny short articles available for free, maybe I can find people who will pay for a long novel full of Orthodox humor. This is called content marketing and is a very modern concept.

As my site’s pop-up box says, if you’ll sign up for my newsletter, you can get updates on the release of Voice in the Storm and its sequels. And you’ll love it so much you’ll want to read updates until the full novel comes out. Right? Right?

More about me and my writing is available over at my author website, ericthomasruthford.com