Late last week I was cleaning out my office at Peterborough Reintegration Services (PRS) when I found a crucifix that I hadn’t seen in some time. PRS is a restorative justice-based not-for-profit in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, which works with federal offenders making the transition from prison to the community. Having worked with PRS for nearly ten years, I have served for the last three as the organization’s Executive Director. PRS has two main programs: Haley House, a 10-bed community residential facility for offenders with healthcare issues or at end of life; and Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA), a program focused on making communities safer through work with high risk sex offenders released from prison.

As part of the work at Haley House, PRS staff often organize and attend the memorials for clients who pass away while receiving support from the organization. One client, Craig*, had come to us with late stage lung cancer in 2009. Receiving his cancer diagnosis while living at Canada’s now closed Kingston Penitentiary, PRS was asked to support him because of our unique ability to meet his healthcare needs as well as manage the risk he posed to the community as a sexual offender through the CoSA program. While receiving superior care in the community, Craig’s cancer went into remission after his release from prison. However, by late 2010 he was given a terminal diagnosis and passed away in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The crucifix I came across last week had adorned Craig’s casket and, as I was the only Catholic in an organization with evangelical roots, after Craig’s funeral the priest asked me if I wanted to keep it.

Craig was one of more than ten children born to a Canadian Irish Catholic family in a small town. When his father died tragically, Craig and some of his brothers and sisters were sent to live in an infamous Canadian orphanage that was operated by a Roman Catholic religious order. There Craig and his brothers were brutally sexually assaulted countless times throughout their childhood and youth. One of his brothers died while at the orphanage. Read More

The connection between dreams and desire is something that is accepted in today’s post-Freudian world. However, for Byzantine Christians to come to terms with illicit dream images, without the benefit of a theory of the unconscious, was a different matter entirely.

Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium (Volume 24 in Brill’s Byzantina Australiensia series) grew out of papers offered at the 19^th Biennial Conference of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, on February 24-26, 2017, at Monash University Law Chambers in Melbourne. Selected and revised conference papers have been supplemented by others to cover the volume’s three-fold theme. Our contributors come from the United States, Israel, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, and our sources stretch from Byzantine Greek and Latin to Hebrew, Arabic, and Armenian.

Overview of the Volume

Monastic writings from Egypt, Gaza, and Sinai indicate the practical challenges that dreams posed to Eastern monks in their attempts to implement ideals of purity in their ascetic regimen. The Eastern tradition of Evagrius of Pontus was mediated to the West by John Cassian of Marseilles, among others. Although the classical background to the notion of “yearning for the divine” in Cassian and other writers of the Western Christian tradition has attracted an impressive amount of scholarship, the oneirological theories of ancient philosophers and their influence on Byzantine thought have been given considerably less attention. This is the subject of Part 1 of the book. Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue launched on August 22, 2017 with a maiden article by Rørik Hróthgar, a former associate editor of ours and current PhD candidate in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. It remains our guiding manifesto and one of our best pieces to date. Over the course of our first year we went on to publish 353 articles, editorials, book reviews and summaries, interviews, reprints, commentaries, reports, and open letters by approximately 160 authors. These have come to us from the Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant Churches, and from no ecclesial affiliation at all, to share with our readers an enormous spectrum of perspectives on an unlimited range of topics.

Articles on sexuality and gender have accounted for approximately 25% of our activity. We have proactively sought—but not always found—individuals willing to write for us whose views on this topic differ from those most often expressed on our pages.

Our sole purpose has been to generate discussion within and beyond the Orthodox Church—to get people talking. Any measure of success that has come to us in this endeavour is due entirely to the grace and mercy of God in our unworthiness, to our growing international team of writers, to our tens of thousands of faithful readers from 171 countries around the planet, and to the generosity of the Patrons of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. We thank God and each of you with our whole heart. 

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MAIDEN ARTICLE

The State of Orthodox Theology Today
Rørik Hróthgar

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TOP TEN ARTICLES BY A GUEST AUTHOR

1.
Will the Non-Christian Be Saved?
Metropolitan George (Khodr)
Najib Coutya, Translator

2.
The Scandal of Sexual Abuse: A Moment of Radical Conversion for the Church
Gilles Mongeau, SJ

3.
Confessions of a Catechumen and Ex-Marine
Micaiah David Dutt

4.
Anba Epiphanius the Neo-Hieromartyr
Ramez Rizkalla

5.
Sexual Minorities in the Orthodox Church: Towards a Better Conversation
Gregg Webb

6.
Juliana Schmemann, My Mother
Serge Schmemann

7.
Can You Be Orthodox in Communion with Rome?
Brian A. Butcher, Liam Farrer, Kevin Basil Fritts

8.
An Encomium for Father Robert F. Taft, SJ
A.A.J. DeVille

9.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Adam A.J. DeVille, Reviewer

10.
Young and Orthodox in Trump’s America
Stefan Kleinhenz

Read More

In publishing this article Orthodoxy in Dialogue wishes, first, to offer support and solidarity to our many Roman Catholic readers; second, to acknowledge openly that the sexual assault of children by clergy and church workers is not unknown in the Orthodox Church (see Pokrov, the Orthodox affiliate of SNAP); third, to dispel the absurd, shopworn myth—popular in some Orthodox circles—that same-sex attraction equates with pedophilia (see also Randal Rauser’s “Catholics Are Now Trying to Link the Problem of Child-Molesting Priests to Same-Sex Attraction” ); and fourth, to draw attention to our articles by Teresa Hartnett on recovery from clergy sexual abuse in our Archives by Author.

Finally, if you have been a victim of clergy sexual abuse, know that in no way whatever does the blame or fault reside with you. 

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announces release of grand jury report on clergy sex abuse.

I forgot that my friends can see these posts. Via Facebook Messenger last night, one asked me, “So what will you write at that website about the Philadelphia grand jury report?”

I mumbled something about being swamped at work with a project, I really don’t write all that often, just haven’t read news, much less the report. Nothing to say, really. Same old, same old.

Then Thursday, in a work session with a colleague who has become a friend, a question from left field. “Do you listen to The Daily?” It took me a second to reply. “The New York Times podcast? Sometimes.” Well, evidently Thursday’s podcast was about the grand jury report. My friend listened to it. I hadn’t.

Tonight I headed to the Y and pulled up the podcast as I drove.  I didn’t make it to the gym. I had to turn back. I came home and dove into the grand jury report. My initial thoughts: Read More