Ukraine 2022 (Upper), West Bank 2022 (Lower)

I’m a Jewish Christian who, after thirty years as a Protestant Evangelical in various denominations, was chrismated and received into the Orthodox Church in 1998. As a former Evangelical Jewish Christian, I find in Orthodox Christianity the fulfillment of everything I learned in Judaism and Protestant Evangelicalism. However, one thing I’ve found that is very frustrating to me is the tendency of some Russophiles in the Church to be very critical of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian Zionists while they romanticize and idealize Imperial Russia and the Romanovs.

As a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I observed the one-sided narrative of Israel as a heroic David fighting an evil Arabic Goliath. In my early 20s, disillusioned with the Vietnam War and the cultural polarization in the United States, I wanted to go on Aliyah (Immigration) to Israel and serve in the Israeli Army. However, I learned that I would not be eligible to receive Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return unless I claimed Judaism as my religion, which would have been a denial of my faith in Christ. This I could not do, and I spent three years trying to sort out this dilemma. I finally traveled to Israel from 1973-1974 and spent four months there. Read More

This brief response to Metropolitan Antonios (El Souri), Patriarchal Vicar to the Antiochian Archdiocese, was submitted to Orthodoxy in Dialogue as a letter to the editors. The author accepted our proposal to publish it as an article instead.

I just read the harsh judgements regarding “human rights,” etc., bestowed upon Antiochian Orthodox Christians by Metropolitan Antonios.

The leaders of the Antiochian Orthodox Church sit on high and make their pronouncements on the children of God who are living under God’s Grace and Love. To talk about pornography along with sexual orientation and gender dysphoria, also throwing in abortion—lumping them all together—is not a very wise approach. They are separate issues. Watching porn and having an abortion are both choices, the latter being a far more difficult choice for most women. A person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is not a choice. Let’s not mix apples and oranges. Read More

For context see the Metropolitan Joseph: The Scandal section in our Archives 2020-22 linked at the top of this page and the Sexuality and Gender section in both Archives.

On October 24, Orthodoxy in Dialogue published the appointment of Metropolitan Antonios (El Souri) as the Patriarchal Vicar to the Antiochian Archdiocese together with his biography. His education grounds him impressively in both the sciences and theology. We noted that he has an article to his credit entitled “The Issues of Homosexuals in the Priesthood” — and we expressed our hope that this “[did] not signal an unwelcoming approach to the LGBTQ+ members of the Antiochian Archdiocese and the wider Orthodox Church.” We offered him our sincere welcome and humble prayers.

A week later, in a sweeping and shockingly ignorant condemnatory blogpost entitled “Holiness at a Time When Uncleanness is Made Legal” (which he may have thought was unlikely to be widely disseminated in the West), Metropolitan Antonios makes clear that his vision for the Orthodox Church of the 21st century has no place for the paganism and satanic mental illness of feminism, sexual and gender diversity in human nature, contraception, women’s rights, human rights, etc. etc. etc. Even while decrying “sexual liberty regardless of whether a person is married or not,” he makes not so much as a veiled allusion to the scandal of the adulterous, predatory, home-wrecking, family-despising former Metropolitan whose downfall necessitated his (Metropolitan Antonios’) appointment as Patriarchal Vicar.

Metropolitan Antonios (El Souri) of Zahle, Baalbek, and Dependencies

Patriarchal Vicar to the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America

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Holiness at a Time when Uncleanness is Made Legal

“For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.” (Romans 6:19)

In the 20th century, between the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s movements of sexual liberation began and the idea of a “sexual revolution” started to spread. During the 60s broad changes started to occur in Western societies, particularly society’s attitude toward sex, which aimed to “liberate” sex from predominant religious, social and ethical constraints, leading to new legislation about the sexual behavior of an individual in society, much of which is still in effect today. Read More

For context see the Metropolitan Joseph: The Scandal section in our Archives 2020-22 linked at the top of this page.

The bottom of the homepage of the Antiochian Archdiocese’s website features a section entitled CHURCH NEWS. It lists the title, illustration, first few lines, and link to the nine or ten most recent articles in descending chronological order, the last of which gets bumped to page two of Church News each time a new article is posted at the top of the list.  As reported in our Beyond the Pale of Nauseating: Adulterous, Predatory, Former Metropolitan’s Final Auto-Hagiography of October 26,  it was here that we were shocked to discover the former Metropolitan’s self-worshipping farewell letter (also dated October 26) to the Archdiocese—including “his” priests—complete with a photo of his smug face that no one wants to see anymore. In our preface to his letter we wrote:

Most outrageous of all is that this garbage was allowed to appear on the Archdiocese’s website. It shines a stark light on the Patriarchate’s farcical handling of this scandal after Orthodoxy in Dialogue had repeatedly urged the cynics and skeptics among our readers to trust the Patriarch and the Synod to do the right thing. It turns out that the cynics and skeptics were right.
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