This article by Henry Bodkin makes the seventh instalment in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. It appeared originally at The Telegraph on May 22, 2018 as “Transgender Brain Scans Promised as Study Shows Structural Differences in People with Gender Dysphoria.” It serves to highlight all the more the urgent need for science to have a voice in our theological and pastoral discussions of sexual and gender diversity in human nature.

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.

People questioning their gender identity could be offered brain scans to determine whether they are transgender, according to a new study.

Breakthrough research has revealed for the first time evidence that the brain activity of people who feel they inhabit the wrong body closely resembles that of the gender they want to embrace. Read More

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