“Autumn Love”

AI generated image by Jamie Arpin-Ricci*

Your Eminence, Metropolitan Antonios, Patriarchal Vicar for the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America,

In your recent essay entitled Holiness at a Time When Uncleanness is Made Legal, you wrote with harsh condemnation about a number of cultural currents in contemporary societies around the planet. Without minimizing the other concerns raised by your essay—human rights, women’s rights, feminism—our question focuses on the matter of sexual diversity in human nature, and especially of same-sex love.

Do we understand correctly that you consider the relationship portrayed in the illustration above to be satanic, pagan, mentally ill? Is it for such relationships that God obliterated Sodom and Gomorrah from the face of the earth? Is it about such a relationship that you wrote the following? Read More

The head of Cyprus’s dominant Orthodox Church, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, has died at the age of 81, according to his doctors.

A forceful character who faced down pro-Russian elements in one of the world’s oldest churches, Chrysostomos was among the Orthodox leaders who recognise the Ukrainian Church’s independence after it broke from Moscow in 2020. Read More

Ukraine 2022 (Upper), West Bank 2022 (Lower)

I’m a Jewish Christian who, after thirty years as a Protestant Evangelical in various denominations, was chrismated and received into the Orthodox Church in 1998. As a former Evangelical Jewish Christian, I find in Orthodox Christianity the fulfillment of everything I learned in Judaism and Protestant Evangelicalism. However, one thing I’ve found that is very frustrating to me is the tendency of some Russophiles in the Church to be very critical of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian Zionists while they romanticize and idealize Imperial Russia and the Romanovs.

As a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I observed the one-sided narrative of Israel as a heroic David fighting an evil Arabic Goliath. In my early 20s, disillusioned with the Vietnam War and the cultural polarization in the United States, I wanted to go on Aliyah (Immigration) to Israel and serve in the Israeli Army. However, I learned that I would not be eligible to receive Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return unless I claimed Judaism as my religion, which would have been a denial of my faith in Christ. This I could not do, and I spent three years trying to sort out this dilemma. I finally traveled to Israel from 1973-1974 and spent four months there. Read More

This brief response to Metropolitan Antonios (El Souri), Patriarchal Vicar to the Antiochian Archdiocese, was submitted to Orthodoxy in Dialogue as a letter to the editors. The author accepted our proposal to publish it as an article instead.

I just read the harsh judgements regarding “human rights,” etc., bestowed upon Antiochian Orthodox Christians by Metropolitan Antonios.

The leaders of the Antiochian Orthodox Church sit on high and make their pronouncements on the children of God who are living under God’s Grace and Love. To talk about pornography along with sexual orientation and gender dysphoria, also throwing in abortion—lumping them all together—is not a very wise approach. They are separate issues. Watching porn and having an abortion are both choices, the latter being a far more difficult choice for most women. A person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is not a choice. Let’s not mix apples and oranges. Read More