The following excerpt is taken from my MA thesis (available here), “A Bed Undefiled: Foundations for an Orthodox Theology and Spirituality of Same-Sex Love” (pp. 13-19). I cannot guarantee that the URLs in the footnotes still work. 

Clockwise from top left: Patriarch Bartholomew, Patriarch Kirill, Patriarch Daniel, Metropolitan Leo

Episcopal Actions and Statements

In late 2014 Robert Arida, a senior priest of the Orthodox Church in America,[1] posted an essay on the OCA website’s Wonder blog[2]—a platform for discussion among Orthodox young people of high school and university age—in which he proposes for reflection a wide range of pressing social, cultural, and political issues.[3] Metropolitan Tikhon (Mollard), primate of the OCA, ordered the removal of Arida’s essay and the substitution of his own.^[4] Tikhon’s response makes three things clear: first, many of the comments following Arida’s essay had entailed an exchange of views on same-sex orientation, a topic not directly named by Arida himself; second, Wonder must not host a discussion of same-sex orientation for Orthodox of high school and university age; and third, the Holy Synod of the OCA has resolved once for all time the matter of human sexuality in three documents to which Tikhon directs his young readers.

The first, “Encyclical Letter of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America on Marriage” and released in 1976,[5] articulates the Church’s theology of marriage without reference to same-sex issues.[6] The second, “Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life” and dated July 1992, states that “[h]omosexuality…is not to be taken as a way of living and acting for men and women made in God’s image and likeness,” and that unrepentant same-sex oriented persons “may not participate in the Church’s sacramental mysteries.”[7] The last, “Synodal Affirmation of the Mystery of Marriage” and drafted in response to the June 2013 decision of the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage, reiterates that “the Church does not, and cannot, condone or accept marriages apart from those involving one man and one woman….”[8] Read More

In some North American quarters the Orthodox faith has come to be associated with extreme forms of social and political conservatism and—in some alarming cases—even with white supremacist nationalism. Deacon Hayes’ short reflection attests to a time, not so long ago, remembered by those of us old enough or Orthodox long enough to have experienced. In publishing this companion piece to Jim Forest’s article of December 12, Orthodoxy in Dialogue hopes to bring into the open a vitally important conversation that is mainly limited to anguished Facebook comments by those who hardly recognize their Church anymore. Hayes concludes with a parodoxical observation: only a changeless theology has the power to change the world. 

January 25, 1971 cover of Time

Jim Forest recently wrote a biography of a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, who died in 2016. 

Why would an Orthodox Christian write a biography of a radical Roman Catholic priest, and why would an Orthodox Christian want to read such a thing? Forest himself wrote an answer to that question for Orthodoxy in Dialogue the day before yesterday: 

When he died last year, age 94, obituaries focused on the anti-war aspects of Berrigan’s life: he was eighteen months in prison for burning draft records in a protest against conscription of the young into the Vietnam War; then there was a later event in which he was one of eight people who hammered on the nose cone of a nuclear-armed missile. No one has kept count of his numerous brief stays in jail for other acts of war protest. He was handcuffed more than a hundred times. 

But this raises another, wider question, too. 

For the last few years the mainstream media have focused on the phenomenon of the religious right. But 50 years ago the focus was more on the religious left, exemplified by people like Daniel Berrigan protesting against the Vietnam War. 

I first learned of Daniel Berrigan in 1969 through a radical Christian magazine called The Catonsville Roadrunner. The magazine was inspired by the actions of Berrigan and his brother Philip, who with several others had broken into an office containing records of military conscription and publicly burnt them. It became a legendary act of Christian civil disobedience.  Read More

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A friend who thinks of the Roman Catholic Church as the oldest form of Protestantism recently asked, “Why should an Orthodox Christian be interested in Dan Berrigan?” He was slightly scandalized that I, a member of the Orthodox Church since 1988, had written a biography of this often-jailed Jesuit priest, At Play in the Lions’ Den.

The core of my answer is that every Christian, no matter what church or communion or sect he belongs to, should interest us to the extent that he or she has lived a Christ-shaped, Christ-revealing life. While no community of Christians has been more attentive to preserving the theology and liturgy of the first millennium as the Orthodox Church, we don’t have a monopoly on sanctity. Christ did not say it was by our excellent theology that his followers would be known, but by their fruits. All sanctity deserves our interest—our divisions should not blind us to holiness on the other side of our ecclesiastical borders. As I recall, it was Metropolitan Platon of Kiev who, in the 19th century, remarked: “The walls we build on earth do not reach to heaven.”

“And just what is it,” my friend asked, “that was so Christ-revealing about Berrigan’s life?”

When he died last year, age 94, obituaries focused on the anti-war aspects of Berrigan’s life: he was eighteen months in prison for burning draft records in a protest against conscription of the young into the Vietnam War; then there was a later event in which he was one of eight people who hammered on the nose cone of a nuclear-armed missile. No one has kept count of his numerous brief stays in jail for other acts of war protest. He was handcuffed more than a hundred times. Read More