Constantinople’s Decision on Ukraine Part of Global Plan to Destroy Russian Church
Patriarch Kirill

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia says the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople’s decisions on Ukraine are part of a global order to destroy the “island of freedom,” as he described the Russian Orthodox Church.

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow

“The stakes are very high, and the order to destroy the unity of our Church is an order that has a global dimension. This is not just a fight for jurisdiction, this is a fight to destroy the only powerful Orthodox force in the world. When we’re talking about 150 million [Orthodox believers], this is truly so,” Patriarch Kirill said at a meeting with participants in the Faith and Word festival in Moscow on Tuesday.

“Certainly, someone had to deal a blow to this island of freedom. Why do I call Orthodoxy an island of freedom? Because we are free from global brainwashing and the dominance of someone else’s thoughts over us,” he said.

“The tragedy of Ukraine goes beyond the boundaries of politics and has a mystical dimension,” the patriarch said.

He also discussed details of the preparations for his closed meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul on August 31, which he said was the last attempt to settle the conflict with Constantinople over Ukraine diplomatically.

Patriarch Kirill said he proposed to Constantinople that Bartholomew and he meet on neutral territory, such as the Swiss town of Chambesy, but the latter insisted on meeting at his seat in Istanbul. The patriarch said some in Moscow tried to talk him out of the visit as being too humiliating. Read More

OCTOBER 2018

Inter-Orthodox Feud Deepens over Ukraine

If Kavanaugh Were Orthodox

Call for Papers: Theology & the Star Wars Universe

Same-Sex Marriage Ban Fails in Romania

In Memory of Eric Iliff on His 37th Birthday

The Orthodox Church: The Loneliest Closet of All

Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Announcement re: Ukraine

A Response to Metropolitan Paffhausen re: Ukraine

Moscow Breaks Communion with Constantinople

The Wonder of Words Read More

Migrants cross border from Guatemala to Mexico on October 21, 2018 (Image: CNN)

A rift is tearing through politics in the global North, fuelled by racism and fear of the other. Anxiety over the decline of white majorities is being deployed as a device for political gain by numerous politicians in Europe and North America. This development is puzzling and alarming, yet it is often expressed in contradictory terms.

This is illustrated in a recent edition of the Washington Post by a striking disparity between a headline on the front-page and another on page three. Page one includes a gripping image of Hondurans attempting to climb a barrier at the Guatemala-Mexico border. The photograph captures the desperation of migrants participating in the human caravan, trying to escape the violence and poverty of Central America. This movement has been met with ferocious rhetoric and threats by the Trump administration, which is seeking to ensure that these asylum seekers never get anywhere near the American border. Just two pages later, however, the headline reads: “Finger-pointing begins as U.S. fertility rates fall.” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is quoted as suggesting that, for America to remain great, it is “going to need more people.”

This contradiction between a fear of migrants and anxiety over inadequate domestic population growth needs to be unpacked. Unfortunately, the tone of public discussion often adds fuel to the fire rather than encouraging considered reflection. Eric Kaufman’s new book Whiteshift is a case in point. He addresses the rise of white nationalism while essentially normalising it. Arguing on the basis of demographic data, Kaufmann defends a version of white identify politics, criticises some anti-racism taboos and supports notions of ethnic selection in immigration. Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue offers the following article to introduce our readers to the important work of Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling in the biology of sexuality and gender. Our approach to theological anthropology cannot ignore the contributions of the empirical sciences to a holistic understanding of the human person.

The significance of this article lies largely in the fact that sex, in contemporary parlance, refers to a person’s anatomy, while gender refers to the social construction of what it means to be male or female and to an individual’s sense of personal identity as male or female—an identity not always consistent with one’s anatomy. This article focuses on the surprisingly non-binary character of sexual anatomy. 

The complexity is more than cultural. It’s biological, too.

Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling

Two sexes have never been enough to describe human variety. Not in biblical times and not now. Before we knew much about biology, we made social rules to administer sexual diversity. The ancient Jewish rabbinical code known as the Tosefta, for example, sometimes treated people who had male and female parts (such as testes and a vagina) as women — they could not inherit property or serve as priests; at other times, as men — forbidding them to shave or be secluded with women. More brutally, the Romans, seeing people of mixed sex as a bad omen, might kill a person whose body and mind did not conform to a binary sexual classification.

Today, some governments seem to be following the Roman model, if not killing people who do not fit into one of two sex-labeled bins, then at least trying to deny their existence. This month, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary banned university-level gender studies programs, declaring that “people are born either male or female” and that it is unacceptable “to talk about socially constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.” Now the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services wants to follow suit by legally defining sex as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.”

This is wrong in so many ways, morally as well as scientifically. Others will explain the human damage wrought by such a ruling. I will stick to the biological error. Read More