This op-ed appeared on June 17 at the Kyiv Post.

On June 14 and again on June 16, UNIAN reported on the latest episode in nonagenarian Filaret Denysenko’s campaign to destroy the canonical unity of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in the very first months of her infancy as an autocephalous Church. He purports to re-establish the so-called “Kyiv Patriarchate” at a “Council” on June 20—with himself, of course, as its head.

In Orthodoxy we have a name for such persons and their actions: schismatic.

Denysenko plays straight into the hands of Moscow and its bankrolled toadies around the Orthodox world who characterize the OCU as little more than a joke and Patriarch Bartholomew as the real schismatic, deserving removal from his position as Patriarch of Constantinople. 

This turn of events was entirely predictable—and avoidable. In The patriarch has no clothes on January 26 and Time to depose the “patriarch” on May 14, I laid out the unfortunate ramifications of the OCU’s foolishness in allowing Denysenko to retain the title of Patriarch of Kyiv. Legally, the “Kyiv Patriarchate” ceased to exist in Ukrainian law on December 15 of last year, the date of the OCU’s Unification Council and the election of Metropolitan Epiphanius as the new Primate.

Canonically, the “Kyiv Patriarchate” never existed. Read More

The festal troparion of Great and Holy Pentecost blesses and glorifies Christ for revealing fishermen as most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, and for drawing the whole world through them into His net.

What did Christ’s “net” look like from the moment the Holy Spirit descended in tongues of fire, and the Church—His body and bride, possessing His mind—came to birth in time and space? Holy Scripture answers this question for us: Read More

This is the sixth instalment in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to write for this series between now and the end of June.

When I was a college student in a Logic & Rhetoric class, the professor asked me to participate in a debate taking the position that “practicing homosexuality is morally okay.” As a liturgically-minded Presbyterian attending a Southern Baptist University and majoring in Philosophy and Biblical Studies, I didn’t have any clue where to begin. I was clearly meant to lose the debate. I mean, the other team had the Bible on their side.

So I called up my gay cousin.

He attended church! He was out and proud. How did he reconcile these two seemingly diametrically opposed positions?

My conversations with him were literally the first time—the very first time in my entire life—that I’d heard any position other than the standard Evangelical one that argues that “the gays” are “living in sin” and are maybe even bound for hell if they don’t repent. Read More

This article by Terry Firma appeared at the Friendly Atheist in June 2013 and was updated in June 2017 on the first anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre. We republish it as the fifth instalment in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour series because a social climate in which these kinds of atrocities are possible feeds on homophobic Christian rhetoric. Recall that the Orthodox dog whistles that LGBTQ people are better off dead continue to be blown by certain of our clergy, e.g., Father Josiah Trenham, Father John Parker, and an unnamed parish priest. 

We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to contribute to this series between now and the end of June.

***Update*** (6/23/17): When we first published this story in 2013, the Pulse nightclub massacre had not yet occurred. So this is now the second largest LGBT massacre in U.S. history.

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The 24th of June in 1973 was a Sunday. For New Orleans’ gay community, it was the last day of national Pride Weekend, as well as the fourth anniversary of 1969’s Stonewall uprising. You couldn’t really have an open celebration of those events — in ’73, anti-gay slurs, discrimination, and even violence were still as common as sin — but the revelers had few concerns. They had their own gathering spots in the sweltering city, places where people tended to leave them be, including a second-floor bar on the corner of Iberville and Chartres Street called the UpStairs Lounge. Read More