GOAL: $5000

COLLECTED TO DATE: $220

✠

~ DONORS ~

Theodoros Lambros

Giacomo Sanfilippo

Monica Spoor

Greetings to all our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world on this, the first day of our ascetical journey to the spiritual Bethlehem of our hearts, there to welcome anew the Birth of Our Lord, God, and Saviour Jesus Christ in the flesh.

The Holy Fathers are unanimous, and Orthodox Tradition unambiguous, on almsgiving as an essential dimension of the daily ascesis of our life in Christ, and of the intensified ascesis of the Church’s four lenten seasons.

We invite you to join us in our fourth annual mercy walk on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to deliver cash into the hands of the homeless on the frigid streets of downtown Toronto. We have set as this year’s goal to give fifty individuals a gift of $100.

When we consider our Christmas budget for home decorations, festive meals, new clothes, and gifts for one another, let us ask ourselves how much we can give to those who don’t know whether or not they will eat on Christmas or where they will sleep that night.

Send your cheerful gift to editors@orthodoxyindialogue.com via PayPal and put “Christmas” in your message. We will update the amount collected and donors’ names in alphabetical order with every contribution received. Check back often to see how we’re doing.

Please pray for the success of our appeal, and for the homeless and the hungry everywhere. Christ Himself comes disguised as each and every one of them.

May He who comes to be born of the Most-Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary bless you all with a spiritually fruitful and joyful Nativity Fast.

AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER 2020

Father Seraphim of Mull Monastery Forced to Address Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Support for Him

The Homosexual Christian

Archbishop Elpidophoros at the Democratic National Convention

Our Third Anniversary!

When Biography and Hagiography Collide

The Future of Orthodox-Catholic Relations in the USA

Raped and Beaten: Growing Up a Trenham

Metropolitan Theodosius and the OCA’s Breathtaking Historical Revisionism

The Limits of Academic Freedom

Review: Edge of the Abyss: The Usefulness of Antichrist Terminology in the Era of Donald Trump Read More

Edge of the Abyss: The Usefulness of Antichrist Terminology in the Era of Donald Trump
Robert Isaac Skidmore, PhD, MDiv (Archpriest Isaac Skidmore)
Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2020

If you’re like me and find yourself baffled by the cult-like sway of the current president over his most fervent supporters, you may also find yourself just days out from the election harboring no small amount of apocalyptic dread. Of course, time will tell whether such a grand scale of angst is truly warranted at this historic juncture, or whether the rhetoric and divisiveness of the 2020 election, in retrospect, will prove to have been yet another instance of so much political hyperbole. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to disentangle ourselves from the visceral immediacy of the moment and attain that coveted degree of passionless objectivity that makes our vision of reality so much more reliable. And yet, there are times when such clinical passivity can be morally disorienting. For all the modest virtues of sober judgment, are we not at some point obligated, despite the risks of losing or being wrong, to take a side? Such is the existential problematic looming in the background of Edge of the Abyss: The Usefulness of Antichrist Terminology in the Era of Donald Trump by Father Isaac Skidmore.

To clarify right away: this is not a book about Donald Trump as the Antichrist. Indeed, early on in the book Skidmore is careful to distinguish his understanding of the concept from that of popular evangelical American mythology. Instead, this brief book [88 pages including bibliography] serves as a preliminary deconstruction of the antichrist idea, sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion that refer to Trump as little more than a heuristic for understanding the idea of antichrist in our own time. It would be fair, therefore, despite the title, to describe this book as far more concerned with the phenomenon of antichrist in its varied dimensions than with Donald Trump per se.

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What are the limits of academic freedom for Orthodox scholars and students of theology as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21^st century?

Given that the terms theology and theologian have assumed an academic and professional meaning entirely unknown to the patristic age, we do well to bear in mind that our search for “words adequate to God” comprises a fundamentally spiritual, ascetical, and especially ecclesial task. The characteristic ethos of Orthodox theology requires that each new generation strive to discover anew—in and for its own time and place—not our individual minds, but the Church’s unchanging mind. Only in the Church’s communion of faith traditioned once for all to the saints, and through each Orthodox believer’s personal practice of humility, prayer, and repentance, do we as the Church possess the mind of Christ. The Church proclaims before the Symbol of Faith at every Divine Liturgy that this ecclesial oneness of mind springs from our love for one another. Thus in the mystical life of the Church the Holy Spirit bestows both the one and the other—our mutual love in Christ and our unanimity with Christ—upon purified hearts of flesh as a gift of divine grace and a foretaste of consubstantiality in the age to come.

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