Orthodoxy in Dialogue has published a number of articles supportive of Ukraine’s political and ecclesiastical independence from Moscow. Yet Ukrainian society demonstrates the same lack of political will as Russian society to ensure the safety, well-being, and civil rights of sexual and other minorities.

Whatever Orthodox hierarchs, clergy, and laity may think of sexual and gender diversity in human nature, we worship a God-man who outspokenly halted the stoning of an adulterous woman. We turn a blind eye to this kind of violence to our own condemnation.

“LGBTQI RIGHTS = HUMAN RIGHTS”

Responding to the disruption by far-right groups of an LGBTI rights meeting organized by Amnesty International in Kyiv on Thursday evening, Denis Krivosheev, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia Regional Office, said:

Given the police’s repeated inaction over such attacks, it is no surprise that members of Ukrainian far-right groups take full advantage of their impunity—repeatedly attacking individuals and groups whose views or identity they dislike. 

For the authorities in Ukraine to tolerate such incidents—many of which have been violent and resulted in injuries—and fail to prosecute the perpetrators shows a shameful disregard for the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

Background

An open public event, ‘The Offensive against LGBTI Rights as a Form of Censorship: The Russian experience”, was due to be held at the privately hired Underhub venue in Kyiv on 10 May, with representatives from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and KyivPride participating as speakers. Read More

Christ is risen from the dead,

trampling down death by death,

and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

Read More

“I’D LIKE TO PUBLICLY SUPPORT THE IDEA OF UKRAINIAN CHURCH AUTOCEPHALY” 

Metropolitan Oleksandr (Drabinko)

Metropolitan Oleksandr (Drabinko) of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky and Vyshneve of the UOC-MP [Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate] declared support for the Ukrainian Church autocephaly [in] his article, which he wrote for the lb.ua.

Metropolitan notes: “The onset of the current ‘autocephalous campaign’ took me working at my desk. In particular, I was working on the final version of my book Ukrainian Church on the Path to Autocephaly. The texts included in this book were prepared throughout years, and in the end there are documents relating to the history of self-proclamation of autocephaly in 1919-1925. Decrees of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the decisions of the assemblies and councils that proclaimed or spoke for autocephaly, etc. The book is likely to come out before we know the end of the chapter ‘2018: Waiting for [the] Tomos’ that I have not yet written.

Will it be the bestowal of canonical autocephaly on the Ukrainian Church by Constantinople? Or there will be another historical pause in solving the Ukrainian church issue? But regardless of the results of the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarch, I would like today to publicly support the idea of autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church. Read More

Many have noted the recent “Orthodox Renaissance” in Western studies of Christianity. Helpfully, an increasing number of Orthodox writers have produced theological primers for Western Christians. Furthermore, Western luminaries—from Aquinas to Calvin, from Barth to Torrance—have been “rediscovered” for being closet Orthodox Christians (okay, that may be a stretch) who offer their own versions of theosis. My own work has followed this latter trajectory in many senses, although it has focused on another “Eastern” Christianity—that is, the East Asian Christianity of mainland China.

My first monograph, previously reviewed on Orthodoxy in Dialogue by Michael Reardon, offers an examination into three major Protestant thinkers of 20th-century China: Watchman Nee, T.C. Chao, and K.H. Ting. Whilst representing three different theological persuasions, I show all three as having a tendency to speak about union with God—something I argue implicitly comes from the Chinese religio-philosophical teaching of the unity of Heaven and humanity (Tian ren heyi). To try to move this conversation forward, I engage Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas to argue for the value of theosis and related theological themes for Chinese Protestantism.

In many ways my second work, Chinese Public Theology: Generational Shifts and Confucian Imagination in Chinese Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018), is a sequel to this earlier work. First, it focuses on the most recent developments of Chinese Christianity in the late 20th century and into the first decades of the 21st century. Second, whilst my first book emphasizes matters related to soteriology—the doctrine of salvation, Chinese Public Theology asks questions about ecclesiology—that is, the nature of the church and its relationship with the broader state and society. Finally, my new study engages in dialogue with two more recent Orthodox thinkers, Aristotle Papanikolaou and John Zizioulas, to offer further constructive perspectives on Chinese Christianity. Read More