A young Orthodox Christian can belong to a warm, faithful parish and still feel completely alone when it comes to dating. The parish may offer beautiful services, a serious priest, and a community ready to help in a crisis. Yet there may be no unmarried Orthodox adults of a similar age. When that person asks how to meet someone, the answer is often prayer, patience, or a vague promise that God will provide. All three may be sincere. None changes the fact that the nearest realistic introduction could be hundreds of miles away. Read More

Due to the compromised clarity of the above image, we identify some of the men pictured as Fathers Peter Heers, Josiah Trenham, John Whiteford, Jonathan Ivanoff, Seraphim Holland, et alii.

Your Beatitude, Patriarch Daniel:

Has the Patriarchate vetted these men? Do they represent the direction in which you are taking the Romanian Church? Our tens of thousands of readers around the world are eager to know.

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God has blessed me with a warm friendship between myself and a parish priest of the OCA in the US. He discovered me through Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He doesn’t agree with everything my theological work on sexuality and gender represents, yet we recognize in each other kindred spirits for whom Holy Tradition is paramount in the life of the Church.

Today he wrote to discuss developments subsequent to my response to the ordination of a female deacon two years ago in the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Some of his parishioners, catechumens, and inquirers are shaken. They question their own commitment to a Church that looks less and less like itself in their experience. “Progressives” might mock the discomfiture of these sincere Orthodox believers. I do not.

I take the liberty of sharing my response to my friend. Read More

St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, San Diego, California

I was born into a half Orthodox, half Roman Catholic, half Ukrainian-Lemko, half Sicilian family 71 years ago. I was raised Catholic by a mother who had been raised Orthodox. Her maternal grandparents, my great-grandparents, were founding signatories of Holy Trinity Church (now OCA) in Willimantic CT, part of the exodus led by St. Alexis Toth. Her father, my grandfather, was a priest. Her family counted St. Nikolai Velimirović as a dear friend, who twice intervened pastorally at a moment of crisis, once for my grandparents and once for my preteen aunt. My aunt was 59 in 2003, pleased but unsurprised, when I shared the news of his canonization. My family always knew they had a gentle saint in their midst.

I had my first exposure to the Liturgy at age 12 in 1967. Two or three dozen people huddled into a classroom while the church was being built across the parking lot, St. George Serbian Church in San Diego. Two old cantors warbled through the responses, psalms, and hymns. The experience left me with the impression that Orthodox worship was ugly, boring, and intolerably long. I burst from the room in a paroxysm of joy when it was over. Read More