With thanks to God and to our hierarchs, priests, deacons, monastics, brothers, sisters, friends, enemies, readers, writers, supporters, Patrons, critics, and detractors around the world, Orthodoxy in Dialogue celebrates its second anniversary of service to the Church on August 22, 2019.

We have sought only to create a safe space to discuss some of the most difficult questions facing us Orthodox and other Christians in this first quarter of the 21st century.

We have not shied away from saying the hard things that we feel need to be said. 

Whether you love or hate Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s work, you’re talking about it. In the end that’s a very good thing. We believe that this is how Holy Tradition as a living dynamism “works” in the Orthodox Church of every era, our age being no different from that of the Ecumenical Councils.

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This deeply moving account has been added to our LGBTQI Listening Tour: An Open Letter to Our Bishops in the USA and Canada.

The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America

George Michalopulos over at Monomakhos has honoured the Dormition of the Theotokos by posting what, upon consideration by anyone reasonably acquainted with the Orthodox Church, amounts clearly to no more than gossip-mongering—Breaking: The OCA to Go under EP!

Michalopulos begins:

According to two different sources, Syosset [the headquarters of the Orthodox Church in America] has been in negotiations to cede its autocephaly and go under Istanbul [the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople]. One source says that this is “a done deal,” the other says that negotiations are “ongoing.”

Given the significant difference between done deal and ongoing reported by his two “sources,” and the fact that he relies on “word on the street” in his pentultimate paragraph, one might have wished that Michalopulos had exercised the responsibility of simply not publishing his piece at all. Even at the highly controversial and widely mistrusted Orthodoxy in Dialogue, we generally do not report news that cannot be corroborated by, and linked to, numerous other online sources.  Read More

The Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal is hosting a conference called Theology in the City: Resilience and Hope in an Age of Fear on October 31-November 1. I submitted the following proposal, which I share with Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s readers to generate reflection and discussion on all that “Orthodoxy as a way of life” consists of.

Theosis in the City: An Orthodox Reflection

Orthodox spirituality, anthropology, soteriology, eschatology, even cosmology, revolve entirely around the doctrine of theosis, or deification: the eternal purpose for which God created us, and for which the Son and Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, finds its fulfilment in the transfiguration of the human person by grace into all that God is by nature.

As a foretaste of the age to come, the experience of deification here and now is often thought to lie uniquely within reach of Christian mystics who practice hesychastic spirituality in remote hermitages. Read More