Our LGBTQI Listening Tour: An Open Letter to Our Bishops in the USA and Canada was sent with the following letter this morning to approximately forty episcopal email addresses across the United States and Canada.  In case your bishop’s email address was unavailable to us, you may wish to forward this to him.

It is not too late to sign our Open Letter. Instructions are found at the link above.

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Despite endless iterations by churchmen who possess no intellectual curiosity—indeed, no sense of pastoral responsibility—to become familiar with scientific advances and the helpful insights of queer theory in our understanding of sexual diversity in human nature, the piously stentorian proclamation that HOLY TRADITION HAS ALWAYS CONDEMNED HOMOSEXUALITY! fails the test of truth on two counts.

First, neither the awkwardly Greco-Latin neologism homosexual, nor the presumed psychopathology that it was intended to signify, existed prior to the 1850s. Its adoption in certain 20^th-century English versions of the New Testament not only raises questions about the agenda of their editors, but violates the original spirit of the word itself. In pathologizing same-sex desire as a disorder which an individual has no power to choose or not to choose, the nascent field of 19^th-century psychology sought to remove it and its erotic enactment from the realms of criminality and hamartiology. Thus when biblical editors attribute to St. Paul the notion that “homosexuals…will [not] inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 6:9-10 NKJV), they commit an egregious philological and conceptual anachronism—with a result no less absurd than consigning everyone with bipolar disorder to eternal damnation. In her 1983 Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic, Orthodox author and therapist Elizabeth Moberly argued for approaching “the homosexual condition” not as a moral failing to be condemned, but as an emotional deficit from early childhood to be treated through a long course of Freudian psychoanalysis. Read More

This article appeared yesterday as an op-ed at the Kyiv Post.

“Honorary Patriarch” Filaret Denysenko

On June 24 the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) convened to address Filaret Denysenko’s schismatic activities which culminated in his uncanonical “church council” of the preceding week. Those who read Ukrainian can peruse the press release on the OCU’s official website.

As early as January 26, I sounded the alarm on these pages that trouble lay ahead. On May 14, I wrote that the time had come to suspend Denysenko from all episcopal prerogatives and duties—which would have included even the right to preside over divine services—and to depose him permanently if he persisted in his rebellion against proper church order. Again on June 17, I urged the OCU Synod to take preemptive disciplinary action against Denysenko before his council could take place three days later.

The Synod’s lack of decisive action prior to Denysenko’s council, and its reluctance to take the ultimate canonical step at its disposal even after the council, baffles the OCU’s supporters outside of Ukraine almost as much as Denysenko’s compulsion to sabotage the very Church that he shepherded right up to the eve of its autocephaly on January 5. Read More

If you’re a parish priest in a canonical Orthodox jurisdiction who feels spiritually, pastorally, and emotionally equipped to minister to Orthodox Christians, inquirers, seekers, and others who identify somewhere along the LGBTQI spectrum, please reach out to me at editors@orthodoxyindialogue.com. I’m the only person with access to this email account.

By canonical Orthodox jurisdiction I mean any of those belonging to the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, as well as the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

Outside of North America you know what I mean by “canonical”—which, in Ukraine, includes both the autocephalous Church and the Church under the Moscow Patriarchate. 

Your email should contain your name, the name and location of your parish, your jurisdiction, and a clear description of how you deal pastorally, or would deal, with LGBTQI persons. This will include the general conditions under which an LGBTQI person may or may not receive Communion from you—understanding, of course, that we cannot foresee individual situations.

Whether you make it into our directory will be my call. (Sorry.) Read More