A thick-cheeked baby dozes off in a rocker next to Father Nikolai's son, Vasily Yakunin, who most people think will become the next priest in the community. Nikolaevsk instated their first priest in 1983 after centuries of living without clergy, which created a rift that divides the community to this day.

Vasily slouches in a leather chair, playing a space shooting videogame on his iPad, while the rest of the guests crowd around the lunch table, laughing and passing around a plate of jam-filled pastries for dessert. The only person over twenty-one who is exempt from the occasional shots of tequila is Efrosinia Yakunin, who is four months pregnant with Father Yakunin's fifteenth grandchild.

"If we stopped believing and stopped going to church and observing the orthodox way of life," Father Nikolai says, "we would cease to exist."

On a journey back through time that touches some of the most remote corners of the globe--a generation ago, Oregon, before that Brazil, China, and Siberia--the Yakunin clan emerges out of history as a family in search of a way to live without compromise. But even at the end of the world it's impossible to resist change forever.

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Before starting on this 20,000-mile hopscotch across the globe, the Old Believers lived peacefully in a remote part of Siberia for nearly 200 years. The turmoil started around 1666, when Patriarch Nikon, the head of the church, altered the Russian Orthodox prayer books and traditions. "What happened was it was forced on people, you know, people were forced to accept it," Father Nikolai says. "And if, there should be no questions at all. If anybody brought up a question, he was beat. His fingers were cut off or something like that, tongues cut out."

The changes that Patriarch Nikon introduced--like the spelling of Jesus' name in the prayer books and the number of fingers used to make the sign of the cross--seem trivial, but caused intense turmoil. "For us moderns, it's hard to understand," says Jack Kollman, professor of Russian studies at Stanford. "But it's rather like Shakespeare, the magic is there, the purity is there. You don't change a poem into prose without losing the magic of it. And for a Russian Orthodox peasant...the way you make the sign of the cross...as far as anyone knew was the way that God taught them to do it. And [their] father and grandfather and ancestors got to heaven because they practiced the faith as we were taught it," he explains. "You don't rephrase Shakespeare."

The Old Believers rejected the reforms and Patriarch Nikon, deciding that the government was the antichrist and the end of the world was surely coming soon. The state retaliated by imprisoning or killing those who wouldn't adapt. Many Old Believers either practiced their faith underground or moved to Siberia to live in isolation. The Old Believers stayed in Siberia for a couple of centuries, but many, including the Yakunin family were forced to leave after the communist revolution in the beginning of the century. "If they had been left alone without the threat of being arrested, they would be still over there. They would have stayed [in Siberia]," Father Nikolai says of his family. Instead, "they were informed that there was orders for...my grandfather's arrest." The family chose to flee.