This article — the full title of which is “Same-Sex Sexuality, Marriage, and the Seminary Professor: Catholic, Evangelical, and Mainline Protestant” — presents the results of a survey conducted by the author three years ago. Nearly 800 faculty from one hundred ATS-accredited seminaries in the United States responded. Surveys were also sent to faculty members at St. Vladimir’s, St. Tikhon’s, and Holy Cross Seminaries, but these are combined with other schools that do not fall into the categories of Roman Catholic, Evangelical, or Mainline Protestant.

In America, both religious and governmental authorities act to validate marriages. Such authorities do not always agree. Most churches, for example, disapprove of behaviors that laws allow and protect—ranging from no-fault divorce to non-marital sex to the production and consumption of pornography. Such laws often protect citizens’ rights to act in religiously disapproved ways without requiring religious actors to endorse or support those actions. But the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) on same-sex marriage introduced, according to Chief Justice Roberts, “serious questions about religious liberty” (27). And since a majority of American Christians attend churches where only a marriage between a man and woman is thought to constitute a God-approved marriage, religious America would seem to be moving into uncharted waters.

Historically, church leaders understood Scripture to teach that marriage was to be a male-female institution and that any sexual activity outside of such male-female marriage was sinful. Not surprisingly, Christians and churches committed to the authority and truth of Scripture and/or of the Magisterium find “accommodation to current attitudes and norms regarding sexuality” more of a challenge than do “theologically liberal” ones (Adler, 2012: 192; see also Burdette, Ellison, and Hill 2005; Ogland and Bartkowski 2014; Perry 2015; Sullins 2010; Todd and Ong 2012; Whitehead and Baker 2012; Whitehead and Perry 2014), where it is more acceptable simply to affirm that such authorities are wrong, at times, in what they affirm. And yet dramatic cultural changes in how sexuality is understood are creating challenges for older Christian viewpoints, with understandings of Christian communities in flux (Baunach 2012; Bean and Martinez 2014; Cadge et al. 2012; Schnabel 2016; Thomas and Olson 2012b; Thomas and Whitehead 2015). It is difficult to predict future religious and social outcomes. Read More

Indeed, when a person relates matters concerning the Franks [Western Europeans]…he will see them to be mere beasts possessing no other virtues but courage and fighting….

Usama Ibn Munqidh (c. 1183)

Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.

Samuel P. Huntington (1996)

Sometimes the most serious errors pose as mere common sense. This is particularly true in common perceptions of the Middle East. The sheer complexity of politics and regional conflict in the modern period quite naturally tempts any observer of the region to adopt simplistic narratives about the region in order to avoid mental and moral exhaustion. But the intertangled and international nature of these conflicts require a particularly exact understanding of the region, precisely because the human costs of these conflicts are so high.

The most persistent example of these interpretive errors is called “the ancient hatreds thesis.” This is the claim that “groups of people fight each other because they have always despised one another due to differences of identity and culture.” This claim is akin to the equally dubious “clash of civilizations” argument, popularized by Samuel P. Huntington in the 1990s [see his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order], that human populations comprise discrete and tightly-bounded civilizations, some of which are destined for war with one another (“Islam” and “the West,” most notably). Read More

August 22 will mark Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s first anniversary of contributing—to the best of our ability—to the conversation on an unlimited range of topics within and beyond the Orthodox Church.

We’d like to hear from you.

Where have we done well? Where could we have done better? Where have we frankly done badly or even failed? What would you like to see, or not see, during our second year of publication?

We invite you to respond to these questions by way of an article, a letter to the editors, or an email not meant for public viewing. Check our Submission Guidelines if you would like us to consider your response for publication. Read More

The recently enacted Basic Law: “Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People” is a cause of great concern. Seemingly enacted for internal political reasons, while defining Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, the law fails to provide any constitutional guarantees for the rights of the indigenous and other minorities living in the country. Palestinian citizens of Israel, constituting 20% are flagrantly excluded from the law.

It is beyond conception that a Law with constitutional effect ignores an entire segment of the population, as if its members never existed. The law might not have practical effects, yet it sends an unequivocal signal to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, to the effect that in this country they are not at home. The Arabic language has been downgraded from an official language to a language with “a special status”, and with the commitment to work on the development of Jewish settlement in the land, with no mention of the development of the country for the rest of its inhabitants.

This Basic Law is exclusive rather than inclusive, disputed rather than consensual, politicized rather than being rooted in the basic norms that are common and acceptable to all fractions of the population. Read More