As we reflect on another year filled with growth, challenges, and victories, we are grateful to our donors. Because of you, RAICES remains at the forefront of immigration, whether it’s reuniting families, providing direct legal representation to unaccompanied children, or welcoming refugees. Your gift made a huge difference for families and individuals seeking justice.

Last year, with your support, we fought against for-profit prisons for their role in family separation. As a part of our fight, we filed a lawsuit against GEO Group, the for-profit prison operator managing detention centers, for violating the court order preventing family separations.

We led a secret and coordinated effort to release immigrants in detention and reunite families for the holidays with #FallFreedomDay. RAICES Bond Squad worked with a group of other community bond funds to free a backlog of hundreds of people from detention. We posted $2.1 million in immigration bonds to secure freedom for these individuals and we did it all without alerting ICE beforehand to avoid a backlash on our efforts. Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue publishes Archbishop Lazar’s brief reflection as the first contribution to our new Faith and Politics series. Orthodox Christians, Christians of other ecclesial affiliations, religious believers other than Christian, agnostics, and atheists are welcome to submit thoughtful, nonpartisan essays on the proper place of religion in the public life of modern, secular, pluralistic, 21st-century democracies. How do faith communities and individual citizens of faith bring the light of their beliefs to shine in the public sphere without resorting to theocratic, theonomic, coercive, or otherwise self-serving methods? What values and principles should guide voters of faith living in representative democracies? These are the kinds of questions on which we would like to share your insights with our readers around the planet.

Archbishop Lazar (Puhalo)

Religious entities which lobby for legislation to favour themselves or to disenfranchise others should in no way be exempt from all legislation pertaining to lobby groups, and to forfeit their tax exempt status. There is no reason why religious bodies should be exempt from laws which govern everyone else.

Generally, when religious groups lobby about “religious freedoms” anywhere in North America, they are striving to deprive others of their liberties, and want legal authority to do so.

If we were to restore school prayers, then it cannot be only Fundamentalist Christian prayers, but must include also Muslim and Jewish as well as Orthodox Christian prayers. This certainly means providing for the purification rituals of Jews and Muslims that are required of them before their prayers. It certainly must include the Orthodox version of the Lord’s Prayer and mention of the Most-Holy Theotokos.

If Christian prayers are going to be public and broadcast on the school’s intercom system, then surely in those schools where there is a Muslim minority, Muslim prayers must also the broadcast in the same manner and given equal time, otherwise we are curtailing religious freedom rather than advancing it. Read More

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Pavel Florensky (L) and Sergei Troitsky (R), 1906, age 24 and 25

Troitsky was Florensky’s roommate at the Moscow Theological Academy and intended life-companion, and the unnamed dedicatee and addressee of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.

Father Pavel Florensky, who in 1914 published the world’s first Christian theology of what we now call same-sex love, was born on January 22, 1882. This makes him just five and six years older than my own grandfathers. God willing, I will begin writing my doctoral dissertation—in which I examine Florensky’s text and its historical, social, cultural, and biographical context—no later than the spring of this year.

The most important primary and secondary source available in English for his theology of lifelong monogamous love between men and for his biography, respectively, are the following:

The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters

See especially the letters entitled “Two Worlds,” “Friendship,” and “Jealousy”

Priest Pavel Florensky (trans. Boris Jakim)

Pavel Florensky, A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown da Vinci

Avril Pyman

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