I started to write this article in March or April, but became sidetracked by other matters. What compels me to finish it now is a conversation that I had last night at a barbecue for Trinity College’s theology students. My interlocutor was a 24-year old man whose family emigrated to Canada from Nigeria when he was 3.

My new friend related to me that, when he was 10, he was out riding his bike. Form a picture of that in your mind’s eye: a boy from Africa, seven years in his new home in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), in grade 5 at school, out riding his bike.

 A cop stops him. Where did you get that bike? 

I started shaking inside. I could hardly hold back my tears for that 10-year old boy, and for the young man sharing his story with me—to his amazing credit, with sadness but no malice in his eyes.

We talked a little about Desmond Cole. Of course my friend knew the name well. A local activist, freelance journalist, and blogger at Cole’s Notes, he has been stopped by the cops fifty time—fifty times!—for the suspicious activity of Walking While Black in Toronto.

If you’re white and don’t know what “white privilege” means, or you deny that it exists, I’ll give you a pass until the end of this article. I was that white man myself, seven years ago.

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Don’t let my name fool you. With my Ukrainian and Lemko ancestry on my mother’s side, I’m as white as any Eastern European. I’ve been mistaken for Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, and German. Apparently, speech therapy in early childhood left me with an accent—undetected by myself, of course—that many people over the years have guessed as Northern European, even people in my own hometown of Jamestown NY and a Canadian immigration officer who prided himself on his unfailing ability to identify foreign accents. 

Which is to say, I’m both possessor and beneficiary of white privilege, just because of how I look and speak. Read More

While it is indeed refreshing and heartening to see Orthodox hierarchs publicly engage with issues unrelated to abortion or homosexuality, the Open Letter to President Trump by Bishop David (Mahaffey) in response to the manufactured migrant crisis at our southern border leaves much to be desired. Not only that, it contains historical analogies and certain harmful right-wing tropes that, left uncorrected, are disconcerting when one considers the role that a bishop plays in shepherding his flock.  

In the letter, Bishop David writes:

Our current president has done many good things for churches, but you wouldn’t know it if you listen to those on the extreme left.

Who, I wonder, constitutes the “extreme left?” What are these “many good things for the churches” that President Trump has done? Has he aided the poor, the afflicted, and the marginalized? Has he welcomed the refugee? Has he created a tax policy that benefits the many? Has he de-escalated American militarism? Has he extended healthcare to the sick? By any objective measure, President Trump has done nothing for those kinds of people so central to the biblical narrative; and thus, I’d suggest, has done no “good things for churches.” One must then wonder if, instead, His Grace has in mind Trump’s fanning the flames of the culture wars, with their myopic emphases on sexuality, abortion, and “traditional morality” as his touchstone for what’s good for the churches—issues that most objective observers would recognize are used as tools of the administration to rile its political base.

In his letter His Grace uses the historical analogy of the Civil War to make a point about our current national disunity. In doing so, he frames the war as an episode in American history that, it seems, could have and should have been solved through compromise. One must wonder if the perspective of the enslaved is at all relevant to this analogy. He writes: Read More

If our Letters to the Editors page were an article, it would rank in sixth place out of 290. The high volume of traffic to this page is due partly to the fact that we announce in our Facebook group and on Twitter each time a new letter is posted. 

We bring this to your attention as one of several ways to join in our ongoing dialogue. If you feel disinclined for whatever reason to submit a full article to Orthodoxy in Dialogue, consider writing a letter.

On average our letters run to about 200 or so words. If you need to go much longer than that, you might consider organizing your thoughts into a short article: some of our articles run as short as 600 to 800 words. Read More

Vasillios Pistolis, a U.S. Marine, clubs a man with a wooden flagpole during the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The May/June 2016 newsletter of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Charlotte NC feted the high school graduation of Vasillios Pistolis. (Scroll down to page 8 here.) The congratulatory blurb mentions his past involvement in the Marine Corps Junior ROTC, his recent enlistment in the United States Marine Corps, and his imminent departure for boot camp at Parris Island.

A year later—as reported jointly by ProPublica and Frontline/PBS last month—the young Pistolis showed up in Charlottesville as a member of Atomwaffen Division. The report explains:

Of the many white supremacist organizations that have sprung up in the past few years, Atomwaffen is among the more extreme, espousing the overthrow of the U.S. government through acts of political violence and guerrilla warfare.

The day after the ProPublica/Frontline report, Pistolis’ hometown newspaper—The Charlotte Observer—identified him as one of their own and a member of the Greek Orthodox cathedral parish there.

The ProPublica/Frontline report begins chillingly:

The 18-year-old, excited by his handiwork at the bloody rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, quickly went online to boast. He used the handle VasillistheGreek.

“Today cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself,” the young man wrote on Aug. 12, 2017. Read More