RESPONSE TO FATHER JOHN JILLIONS AND DR. EDITH HUMPHREY by Giacomo Sanfilippo

During my leave of absence from my PhD thesis on Father Pavel Florensky’s Orthodox theology of same-sex love, I’m writing a small book entitled Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men. Here below I offer a few excerpts that I hope will contribute to the debate between Father John Jillions and Edith Humphrey on the subject of sexual and gender diversity in human nature in light of Orthodox faith and praxis. I’m hoping the book will be ready for submission to a publisher before the new year.
For reference, Jillions’ and Humphrey’s relevant blog posts in chronological order are found here, here, and here. I recommend that you read them before the present offering if you have not already.
theodores icon
SS. Theodore of Tyre and Theodore Stratelates (14th century)
Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Zrze, North Macedonia)

Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men

In offering this little book to my gay Orthodox brothers, I extend an invitation to explore together what our common life in Christ might look like. This anthology of brief reflections addresses many of the themes specific to our lives as gay men and how we might transform them into His life. The Orthodox Church knows, not individual spiritualities, but a single spirituality embodied uniquely in a multiplicity of persons, each of us according to our station in life, in communion with the whole body of the Church past, present, future, and in the age to come. In its essence, if not in every detail of its praxis, the spirituality of the hesychast, the monk and the nun, the partnered and the unpartnered, the person of same-sex, dual-sex, and opposite-sex orientation, the transgender and the cisgender, the intersex, the genderqueer and the genderfluid, comprises but one spirituality. Orthodox spirituality is inseparable from the experiential nature of Orthodox doctrine, our triadology, christology, pneumatology, anthropology, cosmology, soteriology. The Church’s spiritual tradition flows like a living stream from our conception of salvation as becoming more fully human, more fully ourselves, more fully divine by grace, to the measure that the Spirit transfigures us more radiantly into the image and likeness of God shining forth from the human face of His divine Son. Read More

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT: THE ROAD TO DARKNESS by Lia Lewis

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ROCOR’S SYNODAL STATEMENT: MISPLACED EXCITEMENT? by Giacomo Sanfilippo

Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia
The “Statement by the Synod of Bishops on the renewal of 20th-century ideologies in Russia,” appearing on Thursday of this week on ROCOR’s official website, is causing no little excitement on social media among Russian Orthodox and other Russia-watchers appalled by Patriarch Kirill’s naked complicity in President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his escalating slaughter of Ukrainian children, women, and men in cold blood. Excited commentators seem to hail the statement as the Synod’s long overdue condemnation of Russia’s unprovoked war.
The Synod does no such thing.
The statement decries what we can call the re-Sovietization of Russia and the official reintroduction of the worst of Russia’s 20th-century ideologies into 21st-century public discourses and cultural artefacts. As cases in point, the Synod cites the restoration of Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, where his body is displayed under glass in a state of perpetual, perfect preservation; the erection of new statues of the most prominent architects of Russian Sovietism in public spaces; the de-rehabilitation of the victims of decades of murderous Soviet repressions, including the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, among these my beloved Father Pavel Florensky; the refusal of the Moscow Patriarchate to authenticate the relics of Tsar Nicholas II and the Royal Family. Read More