Dear Mr. Lanier:

Please convey to Metropolitan Tikhon, as well as the other members of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, our astonishment that they would have you contact us about the harmless use of a church camp photo, late on a Saturday night from your personal email account, when our repeated requests for a pastoral response to white supremacy and racism in the American Church, the plight of the LGBTQ children, youths, women, and men of their flock, and even a priest to accompany a man on his path to repentance from adultery, continue to go completely unheeded.

It’s hard to imagine that the Synod’s collective conscience found it so offensive that we used the photo to illustrate a letter of love and support from Orthodox grandparents to their gay grandson, who might very well be subjected to emotional and spiritual harm at an Orthodox church camp.  Read More

We received the following letter to the editors at 9:44 p.m. on Saturday, July 20, 2019 from the general counsel’s personal email address. We publish it here because it’s too long for our Letters page.

Apparently, using a photo from the website of the Orthodox Church in America to illustrate the love and concern of Orthodox grandparents for their young gay grandson is too much for the members of the Holy Synod to bear. In order not to cause the bishops any more emotional hardship, we have removed the offending image.

In the meantime, we await their pastoral response—beyond one OCA bishop’s request for us not to bother him anymore—to our LGBTQI Listening Tour: An Open Letter to Our Bishops in the USA and Canada and our unanswered appeal to another OCA bishop on behalf of a man needing the care of a priest.

Your Recent Publication of OCA Photographic Images

Dear Editors:

I am E. R. Lanier, a licensed attorney at law and the appointed General Counsel of the Orthodox Church in America. My duties to the Church include the legal protection and enforcement of the OCA’s intellectual property rights as these exist under federal and state law within the United States of America.

Concerned persons have within the past few hours brought it to my attention that your website, “Orthodoxy in Dialogue,” at https://orthodoxyindialogue.com, has engaged in the blatant and intentional copying of a photographic image belonging to the Orthodox Church in America and its ecclesiastical subdivisions, this without the knowledge, consent, or permission of the Orthodox Church in America or its subdivisions. That photograph may now be viewed, as you well know, in the July 20, 2019, post on that website entitled “LETTER TO A YOUNG GAY ORTHODOX CAMPER.” Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue has been asked to publish the following letter anonymously for the protection of the young recipient.  It was emailed by Orthodox grandparents to their gay Orthodox grandson, a boy in his early teens who only recently began the process of coming out, as he departs for church camp. The authors—and also the grandson, who has given his consent—hope that other young Orthodox people who identify as LGBTQ will feel encouraged by this demonstration of love, acceptance, and affirmation.

[Photo Removed by Demand of the OCA’s General Counsel]

Photo credit: Orthodox Church in America

We want to say a couple of things before you go to church camp.

The older you are, the greater the likelihood that LGBTQ stuff will be addressed at church camps. We don’t mean just in conversation with your peers, but more formally by the priests and other adults running the camp.

Never, ever forget that, if we who are sinful love you so much, not “anyway” but exactly as you are, for who and what you are, how much more infinitely and perfectly does God love you.

Anyone who tries to make you feel otherwise is a liar for whom “God” has been reduced to a lifeless ideology instead of an experience of divine love at the deepest level of the human soul. Read More

The Squad

L to R: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)

The recent racist gauntlet thrown down by President Donald Trump against four United States Congresswomen of color has been met with an interesting menagerie of justifications by the Right. But I think we can identify one congruity that most share. It’s the unasked question which should be important to anyone for whom moral considerations run deep: How can we—tribal, divided, and angry at each other as we are—agree on a definition of what racism is?

It should also be an important question for Orthodox Christians and Christians in general. Both have a sketchy human rights record in history, but more recently the Christian Right has exhibited head-splitting silence regarding the plain immorality of kenneling men, women, toddlers, and infants at the US-Mexico border.

The inevitable outrage among those same Christians (I’m thinking of Vice-President Mike Pence) if those human beings suffering in dog kennels were white is worth advisement. Read More