Father Joseph Birthisel (L) as a deacon

Father Joseph Birthisel of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, who resides in Virginia Beach VA (check the ACROD clergy directory for further details), runs the Byzantine, TX blog under the pseudonym “Josephus Flavius.” When you click “View my complete profile,” you get no information at all that you might expect a “complete profile” to contain.

Earlier today Father Birthisel posted his Protodeacon Theodore Feldman Boldly Spouts Nonsense at Byzantine, TX in response to the latter’s LGBTQ+ in Our Churches at Orthodoxy in Dialogue. The main takeaway is that, as Father John Parker at St. Tikhon’s Seminary has stated, Orthodox clergymen and lay theologians who wish to explore questions of sexual and gender diversity in human nature—and the bishops who let them get away with it—are better off drowned. Birthisel writes:

When will [the Holy Synod of the OCA] respond so that there is no question that a clergyman cannot use his great influence on the people and lead them astray in this way? If millstones around the neck [for the purpose of drowning] are the lot of such authors, what of episcopal inaction when hierarchs know full well what their clergy are getting up to?

Dear Father Birthisel: Nonsense you may think that Father Feldman has written, and a dumpster fire Orthodoxy in Dialogue may very well be, but a). we don’t hide like cowards behind pseudonyms, and b). we have never called for the murder of anyone—by drowning or otherwise. Read More

This article appeared as an op-ed on June 25, 2019 at the Kyiv Post.

Our Tradition Is Freedom! Kyiv Pride 2019. Equality March, June 23.

Here in Toronto it’s seven hours earlier than in Ukraine. Throughout the day of Kyiv Pride’s Equality March on Sunday, June 23, it gave me a sense of quiet joy to peruse the media reports and the photo updates of my many LGBTQ friends in Ukraine as these passed in steady succession through my Facebook news feed.

My readers will recall that I had appealed both to President Zelensky (here) and to Metropolitan Epiphanius (here and here) to join political and spiritual forces—in ways that maintain the separation of church and state necessary to a 21^st-century Western democracy—to forge a new Ukraine where all citizens feel free and safe to thrive according to their own lights, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

This made it all the more gratifying to read of Zelensky’s remarks in support of Kyiv Pride, the robust police protection at the March, the relative absence of confrontations compared to prior years, the largest turnout in Kyiv Pride’s history, the participation of several celebrities and government officials from Ukraine and abroad (including Canadian ambassador, Roman Waschuk), and—perhaps most astonishing of all—the presence of over thirty LGBTQ members of the Ukrainian armed forces. Read More

As part of Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s commitment to publish a diversity of views we encourage our readers to consider writing a letter to the editors. Our Letters page is our fifth most popular “article” of all time—which means that it gets lots and lots of views.

Check the Letters page for brief guidelines and the almost three dozen letters published to date. You’ll see that we don’t shy away from letters that are highly critical of us. Read More

In a climate of fear where Orthodox bishops and clergy feel that they have to come to us “by night,” as it were, to express their support for Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s commitment to keeping sexuality and gender front and centre of intra-Orthodox debate—and where one bishop is even forbidden by the Holy Synod of his jurisdiction to publish his views on these questions—we thank Protodeacon Feldman for his courage in attaching his name to the following brief reflection. We pray that others of his fellow clergymen and some of our hierarchs become equally emboldened to speak out publicly. Orthodox children, women, and men whose sense of personal identity falls somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum are literally craving to hear from you.

Christ and St. Photini (Svetlana) at the Well

I want to offer a few brief observations regarding persons identifying as LGBTQ+ in our churches: observations from Scripture, from Tradition, from worship, and from experience.

From Scripture

The Old Testament book of Leviticus includes many commandments that we do not keep—for example, do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (19:19), do not trim your beard (19:27), do not sacrifice an ox outside the camp (17:3-4), render “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (24:19-20). Those who cite 18:22 and 20:13 (do not “lie with a male as with a woman”) as prohibitions against homosexuality pluck them from a whole that we no longer countenance. In doing so—in selecting those commandments that they consider applicable to our culture—they confess to discerning how to apply Scripture to our lives. But then we may contest their discernment and counter that these verses, like the others, do not make sense in our culture. Read More