It is commonly assumed that the strident homophobia of the contemporary American Orthodox Church has been imported with the influx of thousands of unconverted converts from Evangelical fundamentalism since the late 1980s to the present. Many of these seem to regard the Orthodox Church as the last bastion of Christian social conservatism. While this phenomenon may certainly account for a marked exacerbation in our Church’s inability to have a rational discussion on sexual and gender variance in human nature, the following very brief excerpt from my MA thesis (2015) offers a more nuanced historical perspective.

Response and Counter-Response: A Brief Pastoral History 

To my knowledge, the earliest instance in which same-sex orientation surfaced as a public pastoral issue in the North American Orthodox Church occurred in the late spring or early summer of 1977 at St. Seraphim of Sarov mission parish in Long Beach, California. Samuel Garula, a freshly ordained priest acting under orders from Archbishop John (Shahovskoy) of the Diocese of the West of the Orthodox Church in America, excommunicated en masse the dozen same-sex oriented members at his new parish assignment within weeks of his arrival in May. The excommunicants’ appeal for pastoral understanding, mailed to priests throughout Southern California and signed “Your gay Orthodox brethren in Christ” was met with howls of laughter.[1] The congregation of some seventy weekly worshippers, largely supportive of their same-sex oriented brothers and sisters, quickly began to dwindle. The parish folded after a protracted death, and Long Beach’s once vibrant, rapidly growing English-language Orthodox mission became a distant memory.[2] Read More

On October 11 Orthodoxy in Dialogue published Ramez Rizkalla’s “Eastern & Oriental Orthodox Conference to Be Held in Toronto.” He introduces our readers to the work of St. Mark’s Orthodox Fellowship, and specifically to its sponsorship of the all-day conference to be held on Saturday, December 9, on St. Athanasius and the Incarnation.

The keynote speaker will be V. Rev. Dr. John Behr, professor of patristics at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, followed by Dr. George Bebawi, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Richard Schneider, professor of hermeneutics and liturgical art at St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Trinity College.

Because a great many of our readers around the globe have contacted us to express their hope that the conference would be live-streamed, it gives us enormous pleasure to respond in the affirmative. Mr. Rizkalla has written to us to provide the link: Read More

In Christianity, human relationships can become more than human relationships, and can be transformed into relationships binding man to God. Human relationships can be formed as mysteries in which God becomes present in the relationships to enable humanity to tangibly relate to Him. The formation of these relationships is effected through the Mysteries of the Church, in which each person involved becomes a living icon of the relationship of man to God. 

What is meant by these statements? In what way are human relations transformed into relations with God? What does this mean about human relationships, and how we are to engage in them? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this article. 

God is not a mere power or force, nor an object, but rather a being, or the being, of mind, and reason, who is able to express this in Word, that is, to communicate. He is able to love and to relate. We know this from the testimony of the Scriptures and from our own abilities as humans. Yet, God is not accessible to humanity through the senses, and so we cannot have a relationship with Him in a manner accessible to our nature.

However, through the Incarnation such a relationship becomes possible through Christ. Man can relate to God through the humanity of Christ. However, having become man, Christ was only accessible in one space-time location, so this did not permit all humanity to relate to Him in other space-time locations. His human accession into the heavens, that is, transcending space-time, has opened the potential for Him to be present in all space-time locations. Yet again, His spiritualised humanity still needs to be brought into the present limited space-time of the fallen world: this is achieved through the Mysteries. Chiefly, this has been recognised in the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Christ, yet this food is not an end in itself; it is to eaten so that those consuming it can be united to Christ and He can be present in and with them. This is not the relationship in itself, but only the precondition of a relationship with God. Read More

Jim Forest

As someone who made his way to the Orthodox Church from a Roman Catholic background, I am often asked why I became Orthodox and how I would compare the two Churches.

In the 29 years since my Orthodox chrismation, my answers to both questions have evolved. One of the constants has been to stress that, in crossing the Great Schism’s border in an eastward direction, I neither slammed nor locked any doors, and that my transition has not involved a conversion. There has been but one conversion in my life, and that occurred before I was either Catholic or Orthodox—my becoming a Christian, that is, an apprentice follower of Jesus. Finding a church came next.

“But after so many years a Catholic,” friends have asked, “why your turn to Orthodox Christianity?”

In the early years, I tended to stress what I didn’t like about Catholicism: its monarchical papacy, a fast-food liturgy that too often could be described as a McMass, a legalistic approach to pastoral issues such as failed marriages, its insistence that priests be celibate, its obsession with sexual sins, its insertion of the filioque into the ancient creed. (As Hilaire Belloc wrote, “The moral is / it is indeed / you must not monkey / with the Creed.”)

Taking a slightly different tack, I sometimes said that the two Churches were like parallel highways which, at first glance, looked nearly identical; but then, on closer inspection, you notice the traffic moves more slowly on the Orthodox highway, and there are no police cars. With such slow-moving vehicles, cops aren’t needed. Read More