Father John Whiteford pastoring LGBTQ people

Whenever Father John Whiteford weighs in on questions of sexuality and gender, he can reliably be counted on to repeat, like a cracker-craving parrot, an inflexibly doctrinaire, pseudo-theological, and pseudo-pastoral ideology grounded in precisely no actual knowledge of the matter at hand.

Sometimes Father Whiteford enlists the support of “experts” who have no more knowledge of the subject than he. We saw this recently in his laughably but also tragically uninformed rebuttal to Father Richard René’s Meeting Michelle: Pastoral and Theological Reflections on a Transgender Inmate. Father René’s thoughtful essay—based on a genuine encounter between two human persons beloved of God, one a humble priest who doesn’t presume that the Grace Divine of ordination (or his advanced theological education: he is currently a PhD student in theology) transformed him into Father Know-It-All, the other an incarcerated transwoman—was published as part of Public Orthodoxy’s Bridging Voices series. (Check Public Orthodoxy’s separate Bridging Voices archive for a complete list of titles published to date in this series.) Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue is often misrepresented—whether through wilful malice or a careless reading—as “pro-abortion” or “pro-choice.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We uphold the Orthodox Church’s traditional position from time immemorial that our loving God brings a new human person “from nonexistence into being” at the moment of the child’s conception—and this, admittedly beyond our ability to comprehend, no matter how sinful, tragic, violent, or even artificial the event which results in a child. Abortion always ends a child’s life.

This theological conviction nevertheless requires the Church’s utmost pastoral sensitivity when a woman is presently faced, or has been faced in the past, with a pregnancy which she considers or considered intolerable.  

At the same time, we recognize three realities of our fallen human condition: Read More

Foreword

Most of the following editorial was written before an observant reader alerted me to the fact that Rod Dreher—on what I mistakenly assumed was a serious online journal (The American Conservative)—had christened me a bitchy queen, demonstrating yet again his extraordinary intellect, debating skills, and theological and spiritual depth.

Rod Dreher models the new “heterosexuality”

(I should remind Mr. Dreher where he heard the expression bitchy queen: it’s gay bar lingo. He might want to readjust his mask. It’s slipping.)

It’s unclear what has earned me this honour. Was it my Benedict’s Option? A Priest Forever? Rod Dreher Glorifies Colonialism, Adds African Barbarians to List of People who Terrify Him?  Helping Our Brother on Pentecost? Two Letters to a Struggling Monk? Another Day, the Same Old Rod Dreher? Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s steady stream of fundraising appeals for child cancer patients, homeless people with nothing to eat and nowhere to come in from the cold, displaced children and families in the war-torn Middle East, children and families detained by the US government at the Mexican border in some of the most inhumane conditions of the modern era? My untiring advocacy for queer children, teens, women, and men driven to despair by the likes of him and like-minded priests and their poisonous claptrap? 

A commenter in the same thread at The American Conservative where Mr. Dreher called me a bitchy queen characterized me as “a deadbeat dad who abandoned his wife and kids to start a sex website.” Aside from the fact that my wife left me for unclear reasons in 1995, and I was deposed from the priesthood in 2002—also for unclear reasons—and I started Orthodoxy in Dialogue in 2017, name-calling, fantasies about my personal life, and calling Orthodoxy in Dialogue a sex website typify the only level of discourse that Mr. Dreher’s aforementioned intellect, debating skills, and theological and spiritual depth are capable of generating. Read More

There are many parallels between recent upheavals in the Orthodox Church in Europe and the ongoing saga of Brexit. Both paths of events raise fundamental questions about our fidelity to truth and the rule of law, and reveal the existential crises that affect the United Kingdom and other nations on the one hand and the Orthodox Church on the other. What sort of a world do we want to live in? What kind of Church does God intend us to be?

In my Culture Wars and the Orthodox Church I draw parallels between the rise in the right wing and nationalist populism that produced Trump and Brexit, as well as a debased form of Orthodoxy that raises national or ethnic identity to an absolute and tolerates the kind of fusion between church and state that has been taking place in Russia. I concluded that the culture wars surrounding Brexit/Trump and those within the Orthodox Church are functionally related, in that not only is Russia the site of this church-state fusion, but it also has in Vladimir Putin a leader who has made no secret of his support for Brexit.   Read More