Photo Credit: NBC News

When the secular media reports on issues Orthodox or Roman Catholic, we do well, as a matter of course, to check official ecclesiastical sources to get the true story and avoid hasty conclusions. Whether from geniune ignorance, or from an instinct always to sensationalize the news in bright colours where grey shades of nuance are needed, or from space and time constraints in written and televised reporting, or from a combination of the three, the media never gets it right. The matter being reported is never as rosy or as awful as we’re led to believe.

Since yesterday, social media has been alight with the report that Pope Francis has authorized the blessing of same-sex couples. LGBTQ Catholics and Orthodox and their allies have waxed euphoric over this “baby step” towards Rome’s full acceptance of same-sex marriage. A young Orthodox queer woman wrote to Orthodoxy in Dialogue this morning to proclaim, “Finally, a pope who is like Jesus: loving and kind, accepting, and healing. Love casts out fear. Of course, some hypocrites will rage and hate.” The well-known Jesuit advocate for LGBTQ Catholics, Father James Martin (whom I’ve interviewed twice for Orthodoxy in Dialogue), has joined in the jubilation, even while acknowledging (but almost dismissively) the severe limitations in the Vatican’s Declaration. Read More

The following update and appeal appears on the website of International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC). Note that IOCC provides assistance without taking sides in the conflicts that generate humanitarian crises around the planet. Note also that IOCC partners with the local Orthodox Church (i.e., the Patriarchate of Jerusalem) while providing care equally to Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

A Palestinian boy carrying a baby stands at a site of Israeli strikes in Rafah, southern Gaza, on December 4.

Mohammed Salem/Reuters

Photo Credit: CNN

UPDATE: CONFLICT IN GAZA

Responding to Urgent Needs

Since 1997, the largest, most impactful activities of IOCC’s programmatic footprint in the Holy Land have taken place in Gaza. Special focus has been on helping women-headed households improve their food-growing and income-earning abilities, and on connecting young adults with vocational training and job experience. Our long presence in Gaza has fostered deep relationships and effective humanitarian partnerships, so IOCC can deliver aid expediently when new needs arise. Read More

It seems eminently appropriate to publish this review on the 86th anniversary of Father Pavel Florensky’s execution by firing squad in Soviet Russia. May his memory be eternal.

In the interest of full disclosure, it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that, while I have known of At the Watersheds for ten years, and while the condensed English version At the Crossroads appeared in 2014, the latter  came to my attention only last week…and only (of all things) because Amazon recommended it as possibly relevant to other books I’ve purchased. If only Amazon had thought of this years ago! My reason for reviewing a book that’s nine years old is to introduce my readers to as much of Florensky’s thought as possible.

As my generalist readers around the planet and Florensky scholars everywhere are well aware, the chef d’œuvre for which Father Florensky is universally known is his monumental The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (hereinafter PGT), published in Moscow in 1914 and translated into English by Boris Jakim for publication in 1997. Subtitled An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, Florensky conceived this weighty tome not so much in the usual sense of “theodicy,”  i.e., the problem of God vis-à-vis evil and suffering, as in a more expansive sense of “justifying God”—and, by extension, the Orthodox faith—to the mind of the modern skeptic typical of the Russian intelligentsia at the turn, and during the opening decades, of the last century. Each of his twelve “letters” addresses a topic of widespread interest to Russia’s educated classes, among them the Trinity, the antinomical character of Orthodox theology, universal salvation, sophiology, and male homosexuality. Read More

The present report appeared at the Kyiv Post earlier today under an expanded title. Our readers should bear in mind the vaunted “Byzantine symphonia” model for church-state relations in 21st-century Russia: as goes the Kremlin, so goes the Patriarchate. Note the “accusations of ‘incitement of social and religious discord'” below [emphasis added].

Orthodoxy in Dialogue highly recommends the Kyiv Post for its extensive daily reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and all other news Ukrainian. The previous paywall has been abolished under new ownership/management.

Russia’s highest court has approved the Ministry of Justice’s request to ban and label the “International LGBT Movement” as an “extremist organization,” potentially allowing the government to confiscate donations dedicated to the representatives of the community and make its members  [sic] arrests.

The closed-door meeting on Thursday, Nov. 30, only permitted representatives from the Ministry of Justice to be present in the courtroom. Journalists were solely invited to hear the decision announcement, as reported by Mediazona’s correspondent. Read More