St. Irene. Three icons from the same cast. By Irina Gannota.

In this article I would like to talk about the process of making porcelain icons, lithophanes. Strictly and loftily speaking, the most essential processes of creating a holy image take place inside the artist’s head. They are therefore inexplicable, and the result is always just a pale shadow of what might have been if we were closer to God. However, being infinitely grateful for what has been possible to achieve, I will try to introduce the reader to those visible traces of the human, God, saints, angels, and great artists from the past, all working together.

When it comes to making icons using whatever technique, there is a distinct possibility of seeing yourself as just a pupil for the rest of your life. Whether or not an icon-maker has a teacher, it is always necessary to look through the examples from the past before starting a new piece. For some, the purpose of ths is to make the new image “canonical’.” For me, to make it decent. Read More

Dr. Gustafson wrote the “Introduction to the Translation” in Boris Jakim’s 1997 English version of Father Pavel Florensky’s 1914 The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters. Gustafson writes:

The new visibility and sometimes tolerance, if not acceptance, of homosexuality, which was spawned by the late-nineteenth-century homosexual liberation movements in Germany, had a strong impact on Russian cultural life in the beginning of the twentieth century, and not a few of the poets and artists followed the ways of Tchaikovsky.

In this context, Florensky’s notion of friendship has a decided homophilic, if not homoerotic, tinge. All dyadic friendships in his discussion are same-sex unions. And this is what is significant theologically, even for our own era. Florensky decenters heterosexual marriage in his presentation of ecclesiality in order to privilege pairs of friends. He moves the discussion of Christian life away from the union of the flesh to the union of the spirit. Marriage is understood as a remnant from pagan life, now blessed by the church; friendship is inherently Christian. To my knowledge, Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth is the first Christian theology to place same-sex relationship at the center of its vision. (P. XX)

The brief correspondence below is published with Dr. Gustafson’s permission. Note that he links even Russian sophiology with same-sex love. This lends support to Giacomo Sanfilippo’s comments on Sophia in Florensky’s homoerotic love poetry in “A Brief Response to Luis Salés.” Read More

Father Pavel Florensky (1882-1937)—widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s foremost Orthodox theologians, and best known for his 1914 The Pillar and Ground of the Truth—wrestled spiritually, theologically, and academically with the same questions of sexuality and gender that comprise an important focus of Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s work a hundred years later.

Florensky never wrote anything entitled “Orthodoxy and Masculinity.” What follows, rather, is a small selection of representative extracts from a few sources which fall under this rubric. What motivates us is our continuing concern for a frankly bizarre “Orthodoxy-is-not-for-sissies” discourse and “Orthodox machismo” recently  perpetuated, of all places, on Ancient Faith Ministries, a department of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese. (See Orthodoxy, Sissies, and the Performance of Masculinity: Part One, Giacomo Sanfilippo’s response to Father John Guy Winfrey’s glorification of John Wayne, Steve McQueen, and assault weapon ownership as paradigms for Orthodox Christian masculinity. We have just now discovered that both his blog and podcast seem to have been taken down from the AFM website after the publicity generated by Sanfilippo’s article.)  

From Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, Avril Pyman

Pavel, moreover, as he grew from babyhood to boyhood, had discovered a fundamental grudge against human life. He was not a girl…and all the pretty things he coveted, the floating silks and chiffons, the complex pleats and delicate, pastel colours, the flowery scents and opalescent jewellery, and the dazzling prospect, when grown up, of a hat with a humming-bird—were to fall to the lot of his younger Luisa (short for Julia), who had not fine feeling for such things. Boys were not supposed to be interested in ‘glad rags’…. (P. 6) 

Deeply concerned, El’chaninov [known to us as the author of Diary of a Russian Priest] had broached the question of homosexuality or, as he put it less clinically in his diary of 7 July 1909, ‘Pavliusha’s indifference to ladies and frequent falling in love with young men.’ He writes: Read More

We have removed the wildly popular “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!” by Father John Whiteford, published on July 1, at the request of our host this morning. Father Whiteford had contacted WordPress to allege copyright infringement on our part under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

WordPress invited us to submit a DMCA Counter Notice claiming fair use. We very well might have prevailed: we republished Father Whiteford’s article from his blog as part of an ongoing conversation (see our Father John Whiteford’s Latest Fit of Hysteria: A Preliminary Response) and gave full attribution. We quickly deemed it not worth the bother to file a Counter Notice.

Instead, you may read Father Whiteford’s piece—in which he concludes by  repeating the tiresome and frankly absurd juxtaposition of committed same-sex couples with pedophiles—at the source.

We apologize to our readers for the inconvenience, and to Father Whiteford for any emotional hardship that we may have inadvertently caused him.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue remains committed to calling out Orthodox clerics who misuse the power and authority of their position to harm Orthodox children, teens, and adults who identify somewhere along the LGBTQI spectrum. If this incident can help Father Whiteford and others like him to understand the immeasurable emotional hardship caused to these persons and their families by their rhetoric, then it will have served a useful purpose. 

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