The latter part of Matthew 25, read on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, is certainly among the most sobering, even frightening prescriptions in the lectionary of the Church. The answer to fundamental questions, How can one be saved? How will I be judged? How shall I live? are answered, with stark clarity, by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It’s not a difficult teaching to understand. By this, I mean, it is not a riddle to solve, or a mental or spiritual exercise. It’s brutally simple and practical: Did you visit the sick and the prisoner? Did you feed the hungry? Did you give drink to the thirsty? Did you clothe the naked? 

Perhaps this Scripture’s directness and finality are what also make it polarizing. This makes sense: the image itself is literally about separating, dividing. But the polarization I’m referring to is about interpretation. There is discomfort in knowing what one is to do, how literally one is to take what seems clearly presented—we will be judged by our Creator based almost solely on how we cared for those in need.

One response is to “spiritualize” the text. This happens to other teachings from Jesus, usually about the rich and poor, attachment to things of the world (including nation and family), and the severity of effort one should exert to flee sin. Love your enemy is a beautiful ideal as an abstract, overarching principle; but if someone steals your coat, offer your shirt as well is a little more concrete and unsettling.  Read More

See also Giacomo Sanfilippo’s more recent “St. Paul on Marriage.”

BBC Three’s Stacey Dooley has produced a 53-minute documentary, posted on January 31, entitled Russia’s War on Women. If you live in the UK you can watch the video on BBC iPlayer; outside of the UK you can watch it on DocUR. (For additional context see Ivan Nechepurenko’s January 25 article, “Russia Moves to Soften Domestic Violence Law,” in The New York Times.) 

Herman and Alyona Sterligov

The segment on Russian millionaire Herman Sterligov and his wife Alyona has been making the rounds of Facebook for the past few days. In the full video linked above it begins at 8:29 when Dooley’s car pulls into the Sterligov compound and she is given a wrap-around skirt to cover her slacks. The interview with Sterligov starts at 9:25; at 13:25, he allows his wife to answer some of Dooley’s questions, but he overrides one of them. They bid adieu at 15:00.  

In these five and a half minutes we learn that Herman beats his wife when he feels that she deserves it. For her part, she has written Beaten by My Husband… What I Have Had to Endure with Herman Sterligov, a book in which she defends wife-beating. (In her interview under her husband’s watchful eye she calls it “natural.”) The meaning of the photoshopped cover image could not be clearer: in front of the cabin where they and their five children live, with the Church giving her implicit blessing from the romantically hazy background, Alyona stands—with arms at her sides, as we Orthodox do when we pray—in motionless submission, seconds before Herman’s horse comes pounding down on her head.

The back story of the worldly millionaire who suddenly got religion and abandoned everything to devote himself and his family to a “traditional” Russian Orthodox life—a “tradition” which condones wife-beating—makes Dooley’s interiew and Sterligova’s book all the more troubling. Russian Orthodox men who wish to govern their wives and children in this manner have only to appeal to Domostroi (Домострой, Household Order, published in English translation by Cornell University Press), a 16th-century compendium of household advice in minute detail, written for the upper classes of Ivan the Terrible’s era. Here we read: Read More

At 12:41 this morning CBS News published “Black History Month Posters Covered Up at University of Tennessee with Ones Referencing Hitler.” Copyright restrictions do not allow us to republish it here, so we offer two brief excerpts:

The University of Tennessee’s president said vandals at the Chattanooga campus have tried to cover up posters for black history month with ones referencing Adolf Hitler. The white nationalist group the Traditionalist Workers [sic] Party has advertised an event at the Knoxville campus….

The Traditionalist Workers [sic] Party has been recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The group said its founder, Matthew Heimbach [“energized” by the deadly events in Charlottesville] would be speaking at Knoxville campus on Feb. 17 to launch a lecture series. Heimbach was one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that turned deadly when a suspected white nationalist plowed a car into a group of counter-protesters and killed a woman.

We at Orthodoxy in Dialogue beg you to read the full CBS report and watch the accompanying videos without delay.

This is the same Matthew Heimbach who found Orthodox Christianity compatible with his views—the fact that he was excommunicated offers small comfort in the grand scheme—and the same Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) whose Matthew Parrott boasts of growing numbers of secret supporters among Orthodox clergy and seminarians. Read More

The incident recounted below represents why dialogue has become utterly impossible in some Orthodox circles.

On October 24, 2017 a priest in one of the metropolises of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (GOA) accepted my Facebook friend request. That same day, I sent him the following private message with a link to Orthodoxy in Dialogue‘s call for articles for our Reformation 500 Series:

Father, have you noticed that we have a Reformation 500 Series going on? Would you be interested in writing for it, or on some other topic of your choice?

I mentioned the Reformation 500 Series specifically because something on his timeline demonstrated to me that he had a valuable contribution to make.

He never replied.

On February 7—yesterday—we published Michelle Oberman’s outstanding “The Women the Abortion War Leaves Out.” In our Editorial Foreword we reiterated Orthodoxy in Dialogue‘s full commitment to a). upholding the Church’s teaching on the beginning of human life at conception and b). seeking ways to work together to reduce the incidence of abortion as much as possible—but without eliminating access to legal abortion for women who feel that they must have one.

This is why we found Oberman’s article so remarkable. She begins, “As a lifelong feminist from California, I have always believed in a woman’s absolute right to make choices about her own body.” Then she proceeds to narrate the personal research that led her to discover the women left out by the abortion war: those who would prefer not to have an abortion, but who feel overwhelmed by social, economic, and other factors beyond their control. Read More