This is the seventh article in our On the Incarnation series for the Nativity Fast.

In Brian Doyle’s introduction to his memoir, The Wet Engine, he writes, “I don’t know much, but I know these things uncontrovertibly and inarguably: One: stories matter waaaaay more than we know. Two: all stories are, in some form, prayers. Three: love is the story and the prayer that matters the most.” Doyle, a devout Catholic writer, passed away due to a brain tumor in 2017. He was only sixty years old. The Wet Engine, a reflection on his son, who was born with an incomplete heart, reveals much about the frailty of the human body. Doyle begins the book with a call to action: “Let us contemplate, you and I, the bloody electric muscle.”

And contemplate it he does, especially when it comes to one owner of a “bloody electric muscle” in particular—He whom we celebrate each year on the 25^th of December:

He too was once a fertilized egg (Doyle writes), doubling and redoubling itself, forming endocardial heart tubes, myocardium and epicardium, the cells of what would be his heart miraculously migrating and fusing and dividing into the genius engineering of the four magic chambers, his amazing new heart beating beneath his amazing mother’s amazing heart after eight weeks […] and then mere moments later he is crying Eloi! Eloi! as he dies, he breathes his last, he yields up his spirit, his heart sludges to a halt on a cross on a bitter bleak afternoon; and then, three days later, in the oceanic black silence of the tomb in the garden […] There’s a heartbeat. And another. And another. And another…. Read More

Amen I say to you, as you did it for one of the least of these My brothers and sisters, you did it for Me.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s second annual Feeding the Homeless on Christmas fundraiser on GoFundMe has collected 69 donations for a total of $3928.00 in just under six weeks. This comes close to exactly double the amount we collected last year.

The premise is simple: on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day (to be determined as yet, based on liturgical schedules), my 12-year old granddaughter Eliana and I will walk the streets of downtown Toronto and give $100 to each homeless person we meet. This will allow them the basic human dignity of obtaining a restaurant meal, and/or food from the market, and/or whatever else they choose to spend it on, when and where they choose to spend it. (Our partners last year will be unable to join us this year.) 

We thank each of the following individuals with all our heart for making this project possible yet another year. May God bless you a thousandfold for your kindness. 

Giacomo Sanfilippo

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SS. Volodymyr and Olha, Equals-to-the-Apostles, and the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’

This panel discussion was held on December 4, 2018 at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs in Washington DC and co-sponsored with the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University.

The Berkley Center describes the event as follows on its website:

In October of 2018, the Orthodox Church’s Istanbul-based leader, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, announced that he will grant autocephaly (independence) to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has been under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. As religious tensions between the newly established Kiev Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate develop, the future of the Orthodox Church remains uncertain. Panelists discussed the political, theological, historical, and geopolitical dimensions of these recent events in their commentary, as they assessed the current status and future opportunities for the church in Ukraine.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue is sharing this video in the interests of open debate on a topic of great importance to our readers around the world. Read More

Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics
Linn Marie Tonstad
Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers/Cascade Books, 2018

Increasingly, Orthodox Christians—whether clergy, theologians, or ordinary faithful—are finding it necessary to engage in conversations about gender and sexuality. However, many of these conversations often seem distinctly lacking in depth. On the one hand, “traditionalists” will cite proof texts from the Scriptures or the Tradition without recognising the historical gap between contemporary relations and identities and those referred to in our historical texts. On the other hand, those critical of the existing status of LGBT+ people within the Church often have little more to say on the question than an affirmation of God’s loving embrace of all people, perhaps with scriptural or patristic proof texts of their own. Between either camp, there is often little attention paid to the distinct spiritual needs and contributions of sexual minorities in the Church.

In Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics, Linn Marie Tonstad suggests that this failure of Christianity to really respond to LGBT+ people, both within and without the bounds of Christianity, may be a result of too great a focus on “apologetics,” that is, a narrow focus on justifying this or that stance on marriage or ordination (or occasionally, gender transition), rather than on what questions surrounding gender and sexuality might contribute to theology more broadly conceived. Tonstad runs quickly through a number of popular apologetic strategies in contemporary “queer theology,” including, for example, arguments from God as genderless, the potential corruption of Jesus’ message by the bigoted Paul, and idea of God’s love as intrinsically “transgressive.” Ultimately, Tonstad finds most of these arguments dissatisfactory, or at least uninspiring, but some—Tonstad especially notes “the nexus of arguments from food, circumcision, and judgement” (p. 47) in Paul—are worth spending more time with. Read More