Around 1993 or 1994, an Orthodox child of 12 or 13 attended a small mission parish where the priest conducted a weekly Bible study for that age group after the Divine Liturgy. The program was basic: they read Genesis together in sequence, week by week, with commentary by the priest and discussion by the young people.

There came the Sunday when they reached Genesis 19.

The priest gave a standard God-condemns-homosexuality explanation of the text: he spoke calmly, dispassionately, matter-of-factly—but God-condemns-homosexuality enough to wipe out a whole city.

The priest was the child’s own father. Me.

At almost 18 my beloved firstborn came out to me as gay, and told me in that same conversation that struggles with suicide began during that very Bible study. The shock when a child suddenly discovers—from one’s own father’s lips—that God had obliterated an entire city from the face of the earth over that child’s sexual orientation became almost too much for the child to live with.

The oceans of tears that I have shed from then till now, even as I write this foreword, do not compare to my child’s suffering.

This is the same child about which I wrote in “Transgenderism” Isn’t a Thing.

Pardon my language: there is no fucking “good news” in a “Gospel” that makes children want to kill themselves.

We as Church must get this right. Too many lives depend on it.

Giacomo Sanfilippo, Editor

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Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv

The Unification Council of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine is scheduled to take place this Saturday, December 15, 2018, at which the new Primate of the Ukrainian Church will be elected. All canonical bishops of Ukraine—both those of the Moscow Patriarchate and those recently restored to communion by the Ecumenical Patriarchate—have been invited to attend as full participants eligible to be elected. 

Once the Primate of the Ukrainian Church is elected, the Tomos of Autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate will be delivered into his hands.

Wherever we stand on the question of Ukrainian autocephaly and the involvement of the Ecumenical Patriarchate—whether we are for, against, undecided, or confused—as brothers and sisters in the Orthodox faith around the world we have reached the point, now more than ever, where our only proper response is to pray: sincerely, earnestly, and most importantly, humbly, with love and forgiveness for all, and asking forgiveness of all. Only prayer such as this can arise as incense in the sight of the Holy, Consubstantial, Life-Creating, and Undivided Trinity: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Read More

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MESSAGE
By His All-Holiness
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

To the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP 24)
(Poland, December 3-14, 2018)

Dear and distinguished friends,

We are pleased to send this brief greeting of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the members of the United Nations Conference of the Parties and to all people of good will assembling in Poland this year to reflect on the impact of climate change and the urgency of addressing its implications.

We also welcome this opportunity to engage with and endorse implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with a view to fostering collaborative and concerted action toward this purpose for all people and for the entire planet. We believe that it is the responsibility of faith communities to remind their respective governments of this mandate. Read More

This is the fifth article in our On the Incarnation series for the Nativity Fast.

Time flows differently during the Nativity Fast. The time until Christmas seems at once impossibly long and impossibly short. There is so much to do. And yet there is only one thing that we must do. We must wait.

We wait, while time, space, all that is and was and will be is turned inside out, because the uncontainable God is contained in a Virgin’s womb.

It was His choice, of course, to enter into space and time, to take on flesh, to become part of His own Creation. But not His choice alone. Because what He chose to do would alter all of humanity forever. So he asked permission. God asked, and waited.

And nothing happened until the young woman said yes.

She said it, not just for herself, but for all of us. Because she said yes, God took human flesh from her, as He’d taken human flesh from Adam. And just as Eve was bone of Adam’s bone, and flesh of his flesh, so the One conceived in Mary’s womb was bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Read More