A GAY REFUGEE FROM AFRICA

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Please consider helping Simon (not his real name; not him in the photo), a gay refugee from one of Africa’s most dangerous countries for LGBTQI+ citizens, as he crafts a new life for himself in Canada.

Canada is one of the world’s most welcoming countries for LGBTQI+ refugees.

Simon is scheduled to arrive at my apartment during the first week of August. I’m providing him rent-free temporary shelter in my home, mentoring, accompaniment to immigration-related and other appointments, and additional assistance as needed while he works his way through the process of receiving his work permit, health card, and permanent residency.

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EDITORIAL: THE END OF ROE v. WADE by Giacomo Sanfilippo

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Photo courtesy of BBC.

In the past, I have made clear on these pages that I personally uphold the Orthodox Church’s traditional position on the beginning of human life. A new human person created in the image of God is brought from nonexistence into being as an act of divine love at the very moment of its conception. We must believe this to be true of every child conceived, even when impregnation occurs by means of the worst imaginable sexual brutality. We Orthodox do not have the theological, spiritual, and moral license to say that God creates and loves this child conceived in love, but that He somehow does not create and does not love that child conceived in violence. The evidence both explicit and implicit that this in fact constitutes Orthodox tradition can be ignored only through the most intransigently wilful blindness. I find it shocking to see how many Orthodox faithful, even some clergy, adopt an uncritical, unnuanced embrace of the shrill secular rhetoric and bumper sticker sloganeering of “choice” and “embryos” and “fetuses” and “products of conception” and “autonomy,” and the most absurd distortions of Scripture, to make their point that abortion is somehow a good thing blessed by God and fully compatible with the Gospel. Read More