This is the ninth instalment in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to write for this series between now and the end of June.

This is editor Giacomo Sanfilippo. I want to share my brief memories of an Orthodox boy of 15 whom I met online in 2005 or 2006. Back in the days when Yahoo! Groups was the main way to communicate with large numbers of people, I started a group called Orthodoxy and Homosexuality, later renamed Christianity and Homosexuality. Our readers will recall that it was through this group that Eric Iliff of blessed memory came into my life.

This was also how I met Justin. He must be in his late 20s by now. He found his way to the group through an online search, introduced himself to the members, and shortly afterward began to email me privately for emotional and spiritual support. The photo he sent me showed an all-American boy with silky blond hair hanging over his blue eyes, the kind of son any parents would love to call their own. He was Orthodox. He loved attending the divine services, loved God, and loved and trusted his parish priest. The priest loved him. Read More

This is the eighth instalment in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to write for this series between now and the end of June.

I write these notes “from the road,” so to speak. As a bisexual Orthodox Christian convert, my life of faith has not been an easy journey. As someone who inhabits all these experiences and feels a call to ministry, it has recently become even more challenging. Finishing my first year of seminary, I am only now beginning to realize the many obstacles our Church has placed before my desire to serve God’s people.

I speak to our bishops as one with a deep love for our faith, and I carry a sorrow that the fulness of this faith has been denied to my LGBT brothers and sisters, many of whom have been excommunicated from the Church. I cannot imagine the heartache that cradle Orthodox Christians must feel when their loves are demonized and they lose their place in the Church that has been a home for them for their entire lives. But as a convert, I do know what it means to feel like a stranger in one’s own country, and it is my continual desire to welcome all people into the family of God as surely as I have been welcomed. Read More

This article by Henry Bodkin makes the seventh instalment in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. It appeared originally at The Telegraph on May 22, 2018 as “Transgender Brain Scans Promised as Study Shows Structural Differences in People with Gender Dysphoria.” It serves to highlight all the more the urgent need for science to have a voice in our theological and pastoral discussions of sexual and gender diversity in human nature.

We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to write for this series between now and the end of June.

People questioning their gender identity could be offered brain scans to determine whether they are transgender, according to a new study.

Breakthrough research has revealed for the first time evidence that the brain activity of people who feel they inhabit the wrong body closely resembles that of the gender they want to embrace. Read More

This op-ed appeared on June 17 at the Kyiv Post.

On June 14 and again on June 16, UNIAN reported on the latest episode in nonagenarian Filaret Denysenko’s campaign to destroy the canonical unity of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in the very first months of her infancy as an autocephalous Church. He purports to re-establish the so-called “Kyiv Patriarchate” at a “Council” on June 20—with himself, of course, as its head.

In Orthodoxy we have a name for such persons and their actions: schismatic.

Denysenko plays straight into the hands of Moscow and its bankrolled toadies around the Orthodox world who characterize the OCU as little more than a joke and Patriarch Bartholomew as the real schismatic, deserving removal from his position as Patriarch of Constantinople. 

This turn of events was entirely predictable—and avoidable. In The patriarch has no clothes on January 26 and Time to depose the “patriarch” on May 14, I laid out the unfortunate ramifications of the OCU’s foolishness in allowing Denysenko to retain the title of Patriarch of Kyiv. Legally, the “Kyiv Patriarchate” ceased to exist in Ukrainian law on December 15 of last year, the date of the OCU’s Unification Council and the election of Metropolitan Epiphanius as the new Primate.

Canonically, the “Kyiv Patriarchate” never existed. Read More