For the troubled recent history behind the present article see, among other sources, the website of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Wikipedia, the Foreign Policy Association’s June 2014 “Obama Administration to Turkey: Reopen Halki Seminary” by Hannah Gais, and the recent statement of Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Halki Theological School (Θεολογική Σχολή Χάλκης)

The Holy Theological School on the island of Halki (Heybeliada), one of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, has remained closed for almost 50 years, yet not a year has passed without it attracting hundreds of visitors and international attention. However, it may soon be eclipsed by a more grandiose religious establishment. While negotiations about the reopening of the seminary remain ongoing, Turkish authorities have announced a plan to erect a colossal new Islamic educational center in the middle of the island.

According to an official announcement by Haydar Bekiroglu, president of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, a new center of Islamic studies spanning a total area of 200 acres is scheduled to be built on Halki, less than a kilometer away from the Orthodox seminary where no lessons have been held since 1971, following the introduction of a Turkish law banning private higher education institutions. Early last week Bekiroglu announced that the administration is already in talks with the local urban planning authorities, and hopes to get approval for the ambitious project soon.

The plans for the new Islamic educational center on the island off the coast of Istanbul are not an isolated incident. Over the past year, the Turkish government has made the expansion of religious education in major cities a clear priority. “It is urgent to strengthen the religious educational infrastructure in every corner of Istanbul, the cradle of our civilization,” said Bekiroglu in an official statement, adding that the majestic 200-acre institution will include dormitories that will host dozens of Islamic scholars from Turkey and abroad. Read More

“For I Am Wonderfully Made”: Texts on Orthodoxy and LGBT Inclusion (2nd edition)
Misha Cherniak, Olga Gerassimenko, Michael Brinkschröder, Eds.
Nieuwegein: Esuberanza Publishing, 2017

Before I began writing this review I had to do some internet sleuthing to uncover basic facts about the book. This is not to suggest that the editors had anything to hide, but simply that the format of the title and copyright pages does not make sufficiently clear who (and where) the actual publisher is, and who the collaborating agency. In the end an ISBN search solved part of the puzzle.

Esuberanza Publishing operates somewhere between subsidy publishing and self-publishing. It charges its authors a fee and only prints on demand. Owner and editor Ineke Lautenbach also serves as secretary of the European Forum of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Christian Groups, which owns the copyright together with the individual authors, and whose logo occupies a place of equal prominence alongside Esuberanza’s on the title page. The Arcus Foundation contributed financial support to the publication of the book.

These facts demonstrate the considerable individual and organizational commitments that brought this volume to publication and distribution.

Because one of the editors of “For I Am Wonderfully Made” (hereinafter FIAWM) is a Facebook friend with whom I interact frequently, I became aware of this project before it hit the presses. Yet I must confess that I found myself in no great hurry to read it: the self-affirmation of the main title, the use of sociopolitical rather than theological nomenclature in the subtitle (“LGBT inclusion”), and the implicit conflation of the Pride flag with church candles in the cover art all led me to assume an unserious book, with little of intellectual or theological depth to offer, or perhaps not much different in tone and content from Justin Cannon’s earlier Homosexuality in the Orthodox Church or Wendy VanderWal-Gritter’s Generous Spaciousness in an Orthodox key, useful as these may be. 

I could not have been more wrong. Read More

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