Today Ireland heads to the polls to decide whether to retain or repeal what are among the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. In an article by Harriet Sherwood, Emma Graham-Harrison, and Lisa O’Carroll earlier this morning, The Guardian reports:

As a result of the stringent controls on abortion, each year about 3,500 women travel abroad, mostly to the UK, to terminate their pregnancies – and an estimated 2,000 women illegally procure abortion pills online and self-administer them with no medical supervision.

These are the facts on the ground: abortion occurs—and has always occurred—regardless of its legal accessibility or inaccessibility, regardless of deeply ingrained social, cultural, and religious opprobrium.

The population of Ireland is 4.8 million, approximately 1/68th that of the United States. This means that Ireland would account for 374,000 abortions per year if it had the same population as the US—without providing legal access to it.

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I first became aware of abortion at age 16 or 17—in 1971 or 1972—in the lead-up to Roe vs. Wade. Raised Roman Catholic by a mother who had been raised Orthodox (my grandfather was an Orthodox priest), at no point in my life have I ever questioned the premise that human life begins at conception and that abortion terminates the life of a preborn child: to me this is no less self-evident scientifically than it is theologically. Even during my four years as an atheist recently, I remained unshakable in my belief that a new human person begins to exist at conception. Read More

Anca Manolache (1959)

With this article I introduce to the readers of Orthodoxy in Dialogue a Romanian Orthodox woman, Anca Lucia Manolache (1923-2013), a theologian who remained surprisingly active even through the communist years. Women had been allowed to study theology before the advent of communism in 1946 in order to teach religion in public schools. Due to the ban on this in communist regimes throughout the Soviet bloc, Romanian women who trained in theology before 1948 had to reorient themselves toward other teaching jobs. Beginning in 1991, two years after the fall of communism in Romania, the door was reopened for women to be trained as religion teachers.

During the communist period, laywomen were almost unheard of in the country’s two Orthodox theological institutes that remained open. Yet it was during communism that Manolache, who had prior degrees in law and philology, embarked on the study of theology. In 1959 she was arrested by the communist authorities for “omitting to denounce her friends.” When she eventually got out of prison she studied toward a doctorate in theology under another famous political prisoner who was also released from prison in 1964, Father Dumitru Stăniloae. In 1964 she was hired to work at the Romanian Orthodox publishing house, The Biblical and Missionary Institute, in Bucharest. Among other duties, she was the main editor of Stăniloae’s Romanian translation of the Philokalia (12 volumes in total), as well as the copy editor of his magnum opus, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (known as The Experience of God in English). 

While leading a rather discreet life she began reflecting on the role of women in the Church. She was allowed to participate in some international forums dealing with this question, and even managed to publish her views in several articles beginning in the 1970s.  Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue is pleased to offer the first article in our new Faith & the Arts series. 

“…love is always free, and without freedom there is no love.”

Kallistos Ware, “The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity,” Sorbornost 8:2, 1986

In 1999 the world was introduced to The Matrix. The premise of the movie suggests that we are living in a simulated computer program and the year is really 2199. The world lost the war against the AIs, and they are using humans as Energizer batteries so they can use the energy from our bodies to power themselves. Humans are slaves and are no longer born, but grown in pods.

However, there’s a group of humans who were able to escape the matrix by discerning what is real and what is not. These humans banded together to free humanity. In order for this group to truly succeed, they need to find the One who will “deliver” them from the matrix. Morpheus, their current leader, feels that Thomas Anderson is the One. By day he is Thomas Anderson, programmer, but at night he’s the hacker known as Neo. (Get it?  Neo is an anagram for the word “one.”)  Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue has published extensively on white supremacy and racism in the Orthodox Church, especially since our White Supremacy in the American Orthodox Church: An Open Letter to the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America on January 22. (See the full list of editorials, letters, and articles under White Supremacy and Racism in our Archives by Author.) Four months later we have yet to receive a response from any episcopal synod, individual bishop, or seminary. Dr. Berry’s book traces how we have gotten to the point where the “conservative” Christianities in the United States—including the Orthodox Church, as we have stated on our pages over and over again—have come to be seen as natural allies in the struggle for “white survival.” The American Orthodox Church ignores him at our own peril.

The events at Charlottesville in August 2017 highlighted for many what had become apparent during the 2016 election—white nationalism was not extinct. Indeed, white nationalists like Richard Spencer seem to thrive in the current political climate. During the rally at Charlottesville to “unite the right,” David Duke, the former Klan leader who publicly supported Trump’s candidacy, claimed that he and his fellow white nationalists were going to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump” and take the country back. The President’s equivocating remarks about the violence perpetrated by attendees of the rally made the appearance of acceptability of white nationalist ideals a greater possibility for white nationalists and their opponents alike, putting white nationalists at the center of debates about the place of racism in contemporary American life.

The rally at Charlottesville took place almost two months after the Southern Baptist Convention, whose membership is one of the most reliably Republican voting groups in the country, voted to “denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as a scheme of the devil intended to bring suffering and division to our society.” And readers may already be aware of the very public efforts which Russell Moore, a very important leader in the SBC, mounted to convince Evangelical voters not to vote for Trump—an effort that did not bear fruit as white Evangelicals voted for Trump by 81%, a percentage greater than voted for the self-professed Evangelical candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 election. Read More