Some Protestant churches, where it is now common to have pastors that identify as gay or rewrite prayers to insert ‘gender-neutral pronouns’ are gradually losing all semblance of traditional Christianity

As is well known, the position of the Russian church on homosexuality is unwaveringly traditional (read here for a detailed account of the Russian Church’s answers to typical pro-gay arguments). 

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Like many of us who have closely followed the increasingly depressing saga of white supremacists co-opting the Orthodox Church in recent years, I processed the news a while back about Matthew Heimbach’s arrest and the presumed downfall of his neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party with some skepticism. Heimbach might have been the guy in the room who yelled the loudest, but there are a host of others just like him, and some of them will be standing next to you during Liturgy this Sunday. That fact should concern you. There is absolutely no good reason why it shouldn’t concern you.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue has played a constructive role in raising awareness of the neo-Nazi/white supremacist/“alt-right” problem by posting articles, news stories, and open letters to Church hierarchs and seminaries over the past several months. This has not been enough, unfortunately. The problem is too great now, the inaction too widespread, for these kinds of solutions. Even still there are those within the Church who refuse to admit that we have this issue in the first place. We’ve waited far too long to be able to swiftly stem this tide. Parishes across the country are being affected. Social media is overrun with a brand of Orthodoxy that sees zero contradiction in posting Paschal greetings alongside racist tirades and clickbait links praising Putin or Assad. Where do we go from here? What can be done? Read More

After conducting a poll of Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Facebook group, and taking our members’ questions and comments into consideration, we’re excited to issue a call for articles for our new Faith & the Arts series.

For our purposes we understand “the arts” as broadly as possible: short and long fiction, poetry, films, music, television, theatre, photography, painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, et al. The parameters are almost limitless.

We seek articles reflective of a thoughtful engagement with their subject from the perspective of Christian faith. You may choose to write on a recently produced or older work. As always, you need not be Orthodox to write for us. Articles on a work of visual art should include one or more photos of the piece in question.

Contributions to this series will be catalogued both under its own category and under the respective authors’ names on our Archives by Author page.

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Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fyodor Dostoevsky

The discussion about the labels “fundamentalist” and “liberal” as well as the role of dialogue in contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy lead me to do the following reflection on the role of Christian morality in the public sphere. The problem seems to be that there are two conflicting anthropologies which determine the role attributed to Christian morality in the public debate.

On the one hand, we have the traditional anthropological pessimism which was radically restated by Hobbes following the denominational wars that were the consequences of the radical dissolution of norms in the form of the Western Reformations of the 16th century. According to this anthropology, humans have an inescapable capacity for evil which must be restrained through power and norms. Otherwise the human condition will become the war of everyone against everyone (bellum omnium contra omnes).

On the other hand, we have the anthropological optimism of the Enlightenment (e.g., Rousseau), which holds that evil is caused by ignorance and that evil can be destroyed by education. Ironically, anthropological optimism negates human freedom, since evil is not the result of a choice but of external circumstances which can be abolished. Dostoyevsky frequently attacked this anthropological optimism due to its negation of human freedom, which also includes the capacity to become evil (e.g. Notes from Underground and A Writer’s Diary). Read More