Father John Whiteford

On June 28 Father John Whiteford published his latest fit of hysteria, entitled The Living Church 2.0. In it he takes shots at Public Orthodoxy, The Wheel, Orthodoxy in Dialogue, the unnamed general editor of The Wheel (whose name everyone knows), Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), Sister Vassa (Larin), and Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou. 

+

My response begins by exposing an outright lie by Father Whiteford when he writes, “The most recent issue of ‘The Wheel,’ a journal whose general editor is a lesbian….”*

Let me tell a story from my own admittedly short-lived priesthood (see my A Priest Forever? Reflections on a Bittersweet Anniversary):

On July 4, 1989, about three weeks before my 34th birthday, I landed with my wife and three small children in the speck-on-the-map town of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan. There I spent the second year of my priesthood in a parish of the Romanian Episcopate (OCA), which had two churches: one in town, beside which we lived; and the other—the original pioneer church—in the unfound-on-any-map Flintoft. The parish’s oral history disagrees on whether the iconostas in the “farm church” came from Mount Athos or Jerusalem. (I was amazed to hear my rough-and-tumble farmer-parishioners even speak of Mount Athos!) Suffice it to say that this iconostas stands out in astonishing contrast from the comic strip style of iconography found in most Canadian prairie churches of that era. From the small window beside the proskomedia table I could gaze from my spot before the altar table upon the graves of the parish’s forefathers and foremothers, a few cows grazing beyond the cemetery, and beyond them the endless prairies of southern Saskatchewan stretching into infinity like an undulating green sea.

I had not been in Assiniboia a month when a woman old enough to be my mother came to me: Read More

JUNE 2018

Since Orthodoxy in Dialogue launched in August 2017, June has been our highest month in the number of visitors and our second highest in the number of articles published. The month’s traffic has flowed mostly to our articles on the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border and the current issue of The Wheel. 

If you haven’t yet participated in the parish life survey which we publicized on June 25, you may do so here.

Please consider supporting our work by becoming a Patron of Orthodoxy in Dialogue.

Sexual Abusers: Who Are They?

Brave Pianist: Maria Yudina

In Battle between Russia and Ukraine, Even God Is in Dispute

Orthodoxy, Sissies, and the Performance of Masculinity: Part Two

Belarusian Church Discusses Possibility of Canonizing Metropolitan Who Brought Uniates Back to Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy: An Anabaptist-Orthodox Conversation on Tradition and Theosis

Life Is Worth Living: Someone Is There to Help You

Bioethical Conflicts Between Worldviews

Only Monarchy Can Save Russia – Restore It!

OrthodoxNet Has Heart Attack over Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) Read More

This article is four years old and clocks in at a mere 533 words. We publish it as part of our commitment to ensure that all voices in the Church be heard on the complex questions of sexuality and gender that face us today.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue published Intersex vs. Transgender in October 2017. At that time a colleague in Orthodox theology wrote to us: “I would encourage you to keep reminding everyone of the science related to all these issues. I don’t want our science determining our theology, but we can’t do good theology without the right science.”

When an esteemed churchman of Metropolitan Hierotheos’ stature ignores the contributions that the empirical sciences have made to our understanding of sexual and gender variance in human nature—such as the unarguably observable phenomenon of bodies born intersex (re: the “biological infrastructure” of gender cited below)—he does a disservice to science, to theology, and to human persons who simply do not fit into a tidy binarial schema of gender.

Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos)

Until now we knew that there were two genders, the male and the female, or man and woman. There were also some who wavered from this for various reasons, primarily due to the passions. But recently there has arisen another person of the “third gender,” as it has been named by the courts, after many years of struggle made by such people of an “indeterminate gender” or “third gender.”

Someone named Norrie May-Welby, who was born in Scotland as a man, later went to Australia where he underwent gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, because he believed that he did not feel comfortable as an individual of the female gender, so he decided to discontinue hormone therapy to have an operation to avoid belonging to a “predetermined” gender. Then he began a long struggle to be legally recognized as a person of an “indeterminate” gender.

On Wednesday 2 April 2014 “the Supreme Court of Australia ruled that the State of New South Wales should recognize the existence of this third ‘indeterminate’ gender to which Norrie May-Welby belongs” (Ta Nea, 04/04/2014). Thus was born a person of an “indeterminate gender” (non-specific sex), who is neither a man nor a woman.

One is struck by the point to which a person can reach, who is frustrated by all things and wants to taste new experiences and situations. There are many who, claiming human rights for all people, are ready to accept and adopt such a mindset. But if we start accepting human rights without any necessary restrictions, then we will arrive at a social catastrophe. Read More

Addendum: One of our readers has alerted us to this Snopes report, according to which Rod Dreher—in his article of May 8, 2017, “When Is It OK to Kill Whites?”—falsely accuses African-American professor Tommy Curry of advocating the murder of white people. According to Snopes, “After [Dreher’s] blog post was published, Curry started receiving death threats that were serious enough to warrant what he described as a constant police presence near his home.” Dreher remained unapologetic when Snopes reached out to him for comment.

This morning Rod Dreher published “Miguel Monjardino’s República” at The American Conservative. In it he glorifies the West’s colonial past, adds 21st-century African barbarians to the list of people who terrify him, and finds yet another opportunity to plug The Benedict Option. (For critiques of the latter, see Giacomo Sanfilippo’s here, George Demacopoulos’ here, and Adam DeVille’s here.)

Our readers are encouraged to read Mr. Dreher’s piece in full to form their own opinion. Here we offer only a few of his more salient points:

One of the best things — the very best thing, in fact — about traveling is getting to meet extraordinary people.

We met Miguel and Kika at a picnic table down by the harbor in Angra do Heroismo, the capital city. We arrived on Terceira for the island’s annual St. John festival. Over platters of limpets (sea snails) grilled in their shell, in olive oil and chopped garlic, we got to know each other.

Miguel explained to us how the city was vital to Portuguese trade in the East Indies, and how much money had passed through the place during Portugal’s heyday as one of the world’s great colonial powers….

But the challenges the US faces are relatively small compared to the massive problems coming hard and fast at Europe, in the form of African migration.

Where are those Africans going to go? They’re going toward Europe, which is depopulating. Miguel said that given the geography of the Mediterranean, it’s going to be very, very hard for Europe to keep African migrants from entering.

Will the latter-day descendants of those Europeans be able to hold back the “barbarian invasions” from Africa in the 21st century?

Miguel Monjardino…is a secular Benedict Option abbot, working to keep tradition alive through the new Dark Age.

Be of good cheer, reader. The times are dark, but there are men and women of good will working to guard and spread the light in the hidden places of the crumbling Empire. Read More