This article is four years old, yet it remains as relevant today for Orthodox readers as when it first appeared in print. The quasi official alliance of the Orthodox Church in the USA with the social and political conservatism of right-wing Evangelicalism—see, for instance, the high profile Orthodox signatories of the questionable Manhattan Declaration of November 2009—continues to make for stranger and more unfortunate bedfellows with the passing of time. Case in point: see Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s extensive coverage of the rise of white supremacy and neo-Nazism (White Supremacy and Racism section in Archives by Author) in certain parishes, seminaries, and monasteries of the American Orthodox Church. The aggressive politicization of what should remain pastoral issues for us (abortion, same-sex marriage, et al.) creates an ecclesial climate in which too many overt racists and white supremacists find a natural home for themselves.

6-year old Ruby Bridges being escorted to and from school (1960).

They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti-Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism. Read More

I have long been perplexed by the embarrassment that the contemporary scientific world feels towards religious faith. This is a recent phenomenon. History is full of believing scientists. There is an equally puzzling tendency for many religious people to view science either as a threat to faith, or—which is perhaps worse—to treat it as a completely separate realm of truth, with little relationship to faith. Certainly, the knowledge that comes from loving God (γνῶσις, gnosis) is distinct from the knowledge of science (ἐπιστήμη, episteme). The first is to know the living God through love, the second is to know about God’s creation. But since God created both the heart and the head they must be designed to work together in the service of His love.

For me personally, the study of God’s world and scientific discoveries is to breathe in the fragrance of Christ. Knowledge of this world makes me desire and seek its Creator even more. Each discovery is a footprint—not the Beloved Himself, but an imprint, and an imprint with a direction pointing towards Him.

And when we do follow the footprints and eventually meet and commune with Him who “made the stars also,” our mind is expanded. This in turn makes us more able to receive further scientific insight into the splendours of His world. Life with Christ is full of surprises. Beholding Him, we pass “from glory to glory.” This spiritual awareness that there will always be new realms in one’s spiritual life helps to keep the mind flexible, and therefore also open to new paradigms of science, both to learn them from others, and even to discover new things. A healthy faith feeds scientific discovery; it does not trammel it.

In this article I want to explore a more mutually positive view of the relationship of faith and science—with an emphasis on physics—a view that could benefit both science and our relationship with God. I am by no means suggesting an interference of one field in the other. Yet when I noticed the remarkable similarities between the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and trinitarian theology, and of relativity with other theological truths, I couldn’t help but think that, in future, some theological principles might just suggest to scientists a fresh way of looking at a particular scientific problem—not in a dogmatic or rigid way, but as a possible avenue to explore. A scholar friend has told me that this approach is called, broadly speaking, correlationism or correspondentism. Read More

~

Unsleeping sleep

Fallen asleep, unceasingly wakeful,
Eyes closed in death, with life overbrimming,
In darkness enshrouded, unquenchable light,
Fruitfully barren, aflame, yet unburnt;

Field unsown yielding harvest of bread,
Receptacle hidden encompassing heaven,
Marble unquarried and pigment unmixed,
Whence sculpted and Sculptor, image and Imaged;

Virginal mother, bride though unwedded,
Departed, remaining, and never forsaking;
Each tear of her orphans dispelled by her hand,
Her tomb of great sorrow with blossoms bursts forth.

Read More

The canonical status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada was normalized in 1990, and that of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the United States of America in 1994, when these two bodies were received into the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and, ipso facto, into communion with the worldwide Orthodox Church. Their advocacy for an autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine—which is likewise supported by Orthodoxy in Dialogue—can certainly be presumed to exercise some role as Patriarch Bartholomew formulates his approach to the question.

The Russian Orthodox Church responded to the message of the Ecumenical Patriarchate regarding the upcoming meeting of its head, Bartholomew I, with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.

The Communications Service of the Department of External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate has confirmed the announcement that such a meeting is scheduled for August 31 in Istanbul, Turkey, where the residence of the Ecumenical Patriarch is located, Radio Liberty reports.

In this case, in the message, Patriarch Bartholomew is not referred to as Ecumenical, but his other traditional title, Patriarch of Constantinople. The title “of Constantinople” designates the patriarch as a head of one of almost one and a half dozen mutually recognized, “canonical” local Orthodox Churches, the Church of Constantinople, while the title “Ecumenical” — omitted by Moscow — points to his traditional “first-in-honor” status in the Orthodox world and his special powers, including the provision of autocephaly (self-government) to new local Orthodox Churches. Read More