This abridged translation was made by Dr. Ioannis Lotsios of the University of Thessaloniki. The Greek original appeared on March 5 on the Panorthodox Synod blog.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue has introduced a few minor modifications to the translation for the sake of clarity and stylistic consistency. 

Dr. Petros Vassiliadis

The concept of identity, which is very often used today by scholars, is quite ambiguous. Previously, identity was considered a given. But today, due to the research of the social sciences—though their findings are still questioned by some—it is argued that all identities are “constructions.” This is why we talk about “shaping” the identity of a person or group in the sense of a dynamic process through which the identity of the individual or group is constantly formed by their environment, thereby developing a new ethos. Modern and postmodern ethics, in many ways, attempt to impose an inclusive ethos, while traditional societies—and especially religious ones—advocate an exclusive ethos. The inclusive ethos seeks to integrate a group into its social context, which it often attempts to shape. The exclusive ethos seeks [to maintain] the necessary distance through persistence in traditional values: this is because any “construction” has anthropocentric features, and sometimes it conflicts with eternal or changeless truths.

There are of course cases, even in the New Testament texts, where the ethos of one or another group is mixed, with its “exclusive” side tracing the “limits,” considering everything else as being on the outside, heretical, etc., while its “inclusive” side expresses the manifold, and constantly evolves.

Dr. D.S. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou in her book, To the Limits: Gendered Studies of Christian Presence, History, Crisis, and Hope (Athens 2016), deals with this issue from the point of view of Christian witness. I subscribe to her effort, since in my academic career I have also tried to introduce sociological and feminist interpretations, areas if not entirely unknown in the field of biblical exegesis, at least—for the Orthodox tradition—“to the limit.” Read More

Dr. Petros Vassiliadis, professor emeritus of theology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, has graciously brought the present article to our attention. Entitled “Περί ‘αλλαγής φύλου’ και η ιστορία και χρήση μιας σχετικής ευχής,” it appeared on Sunday, October 22 on Father Timothy’s Αγιοκέρι (Agiokeri) blog. We publish it as a sequel to our “Greek Prayer for Transgender Name Change” and “Intersex vs. Transgender.”

In sharing Father Timothy’s article we are not arguing for the now discredited and largely discontinued practice of surgical modification for intersex newborns. As Dr. Vassiliadis aptly notes in the discussion in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Facebook group, “The crucial point of that historical event, I think, is not so much the correctness of the surgical intervention, but the readiness of the Church to meet without any prejudice, and in cooperation with both theology and science, the pastoral needs of the time with loving Christian concern. Much more progressive an attitude than nowadays.” More than fifty years later one cannot but wonder at the Church’s intransigent resistance to scientific and social advances in our understanding of human sexuality, sexual orientation, gender and transgender identity, etc. 

The issue of gender change, or rather, of gender correction, was experienced jointly for the first time by the [Greek] Church and the [Greek] State in 1963, when corrective medical intervention was offered to a person with an intersex condition for the first time, and the Ministry of Interior sought the advice of the Church as to the identity of the person. The Metropolitan of Paramythia, Titus (Matthaiakes), handled the matter with his Synod, which sought and received the advice of Amilka Aleivatos, Professor of Canon Law, and Georgios Merikas, Director of the Pathology Clinic at Evangelismos Hospital. Both agreed that only with the intervention of science would this person be able to live a normal life, and that this had already been done; and so all that remained was the matter of renaming the person. They also agreed that the Church, with love and affection, should take special pastoral care of this person and any others who appeared in the future; and that the Church accepted that, when these circumstances arose, there was the need for a special blessing for renaming the person since the person was already baptized.

The void which existed in the Church’s euchologions was addressed by the wise and scholarly Metropolitan Timothy (Matthaiakes), then of Maroneia and later of New Ionia, who drew up a special blessing for this situation. Read More

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When Public Orthodoxy published “Conjugal Friendship” on May 2, a number of commentators objected in particular to its conflation of friendship with conjugacy. The present reflection seeks to address some of those concerns. 

“Happy Battle” – from Father Pavel Florensky’s 1914 “Friendship”

My use of conjugal in a sense that both subsumes and transcends its marital connotation derives from a number of interrelated linguistic factors, mainly its Latin cognates and their Greek equivalents. I share Florensky’s structuralist approach to language, which gives priority to the embedded etymological meaning of a word over its conventional usage in a given time and place or the idiosyncratic intention of a given speaker. This places us at odds with postmodern assumptions about language while not denying its intrinsic malleability as a living medium of communication. Our attention to the morphemic structure of words, with its implicit premise that language possesses on some level an interior life of its own that operates independently of us—to wit, that language imposes itself on us, both shaping and revealing human reality no less than we shape and reveal our own reality through our creative use of language—remains as central to understanding Florensky’s theology of friendship as it does, for instance, to biblical studies.     Read More