St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833) is arguably the most beloved of modern saints anywhere in the Orthodox world. We have seen his icon even in Greek churches. He is remembered for his gentleness, his relationship with wild animals, his visions of uncreated light, his conversation with Nicholas Motovilov on the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, and his practice of calling all his visitors my joy as he greeted them every day of the year with Christ is risen, my joy! 

A less likely candidate for patron saint of Russia’s nuclear arsenal there could not be.

The following short excerpts are taken from Russian Orthodox Church Considers a Ban on Blessing Weapons of Mass Destruction, which appeared yesterday at Religion News Service. We encourage you to take a few minutes to read the whole report at the source. 

St. Seraphim of Sarov

As police officers stood guard [in May 2018], two Russian Orthodox priests wearing cassocks and holding Bibles climbed out of a vehicle and began sprinkling holy water on the stationary Topol and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Priests have sanctified S-400 surface-to-air missiles, nuclear submarines, tanks and fighter jets.

Vsevolod Chaplin, an influential priest and former spokesman for the patriarch, told the Vzglyad newspaper that nuclear weapons were the country’s “guardian angels” and necessary to preserve “Orthodox civilization.” Read More

In sending our Open Letter to the bishops of the United States and Canada this morning we invited them to send responses which we would be happy to publish. 

Archbishop Mark (Maymon) of Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania

Orthodox Church in America

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Our LGBTQI Listening Tour: An Open Letter to Our Bishops in the USA and Canada was sent with the following letter this morning to approximately forty episcopal email addresses across the United States and Canada.  In case your bishop’s email address was unavailable to us, you may wish to forward this to him.

It is not too late to sign our Open Letter. Instructions are found at the link above.

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Despite endless iterations by churchmen who possess no intellectual curiosity—indeed, no sense of pastoral responsibility—to become familiar with scientific advances and the helpful insights of queer theory in our understanding of sexual diversity in human nature, the piously stentorian proclamation that HOLY TRADITION HAS ALWAYS CONDEMNED HOMOSEXUALITY! fails the test of truth on two counts.

First, neither the awkwardly Greco-Latin neologism homosexual, nor the presumed psychopathology that it was intended to signify, existed prior to the 1850s. Its adoption in certain 20^th-century English versions of the New Testament not only raises questions about the agenda of their editors, but violates the original spirit of the word itself. In pathologizing same-sex desire as a disorder which an individual has no power to choose or not to choose, the nascent field of 19^th-century psychology sought to remove it and its erotic enactment from the realms of criminality and hamartiology. Thus when biblical editors attribute to St. Paul the notion that “homosexuals…will [not] inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 6:9-10 NKJV), they commit an egregious philological and conceptual anachronism—with a result no less absurd than consigning everyone with bipolar disorder to eternal damnation. In her 1983 Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic, Orthodox author and therapist Elizabeth Moberly argued for approaching “the homosexual condition” not as a moral failing to be condemned, but as an emotional deficit from early childhood to be treated through a long course of Freudian psychoanalysis. Read More