My name is Hermione Madsen. I’m an Orthodox Christian, Supiaq Alutiiq, and a trans woman from Kodiak, Alaska — a place where the sea, faith, and ancestral spirit all live close together. I walk the path of both tradition and transformation, seeking to follow Christ with honesty and love. The lives of the saints, especially St. Herman of Alaska, have shaped my heart and given me hope when I felt unseen.

My journey in the Orthodox Church has not been easy. I’ve faced rejection, silence, and even persecution from some who could not see Christ’s image in me. I’ve been denied confession and Communion, and watched the community I love turn away in fear. Yet, even through that pain, I’ve learned that true Orthodoxy is not built on exclusion but on the mercy and compassion of Jesus Himself. His love has never left me — and it is that same love I want to share with others who feel cast aside. Read More

Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) is known to English-language readers as the author of Everyday Saints and Other Stories, written when he was abbot of Sretensky Monastery. The following open letter responds to his The Example of Charlie Kirk Is a Lesson for Us, which appeared in Russian on Pravoslavie.Ru with the title “If You Eliminate Me, Others will Rise Up and Speak out Louder”: On Charlie Kirk and His Statements, and in English translation on Orthodox Christianity .

Your Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon of Simferopol and Crimea: 

I’ve read with some interest your recently published article entitled, “The Example of Charlie Kirk is a Lesson for Us.” I have some thoughts to share. Read More

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.

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

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