As a prison chaplain in a pluralistic environment, I have often engaged in conversations with men and women of other faiths. This has challenged me to understand how Orthodox Christians can fruitfully engage in interfaith dialogue.*

To illustrate my own process of understanding, I would like to sketch an hypothetical interaction with an inmate called Damien, a Muslim who by all accounts practices his religion consistently, thoughtfully, and sincerely.

One day, Damien asks me a question: How can he find out whether his religion is true? He comes to me and not, say, to his own Muslim Chaplain, because I will respect his freedom to search without coercing him (however gently) to my own answer. At the same time, my own faith commitment compels me to respond to Damien in a way that maintains the integrity of Orthodox Christianity, including its claims to exclusive fulness of truth. How do I prepare? I go to that quintessential scriptural interfaith engagement: the Apostle Paul’s speech to the philosophers of Athens (Acts 17:22-31).

In this speech, St. Paul identifies an “unknown god” (v. 23) as the basis of dialogue with his pagan Greek audience. This unknown god is singular, utterly transcendent, and independent not only of human control (vv. 24-25), but also of the human ability to imaginatively conceive and thus represent (v. 29). The Apostle highlights here a way of thinking about God that is developed more fully in later Christian theology: apophaticism, a systematic negation of positive human conceptions of God’s nature. Read More

Sergey Sergeevich Horujy

In surveying the contemporary world as it appears to us in the daily media, in academic papers, and in our own personal observations, we find much cause for concern about conditions and unsustainable trends on Planet Earth, whether we are considering the health (in all senses of the word) of human populations or the sources of nutritious food, clean water, and affordable housing—or even the quality and character of our thoughts. Freedom together with “good government” (however these are defined) are often short-lived and in limited supply around the globe. The level of discourse in the public square often seems vulgar. The character of public education at all levels often seems unrelated to the actual needs of many people, and the cost, beyond their ability to pay. Nor is it designed to form young people in warm-hearted humanity, which used to be fruit and flower of a kind of Christian humanism in Western civilization. There are, of course, reasons for public education being structured as it is. Education (or training) delivery systems seem designed to serve the interests of corporate entities around the globe, without regard to the telos of human being. 

None of these observations or concerns is new. They all, however, derive from who we understand ourselves to be and, consequently, from what we have done to ourselves and to our planet. What, then, is the human being?  How shall we understand humankind in the largest possible sense?

Sergey S. Horujy [Хоружий] is a contemporary Russian philosopher whose “Synergic Anthropology” offers both a critique of philosophical anthropology in Western philosophical tradition and also a positive account of the human being based on his knowledge of modern Russian religious philosophy, as well as—and especially—on hesychastic thought and practice. One of Horujy’s most stimulating conversation partners in recent years has been the Confucian scholar, Tu Weiming, of Harvard and Peking University.  Read More

Sergei Semionovich Troitsky

August 8, 1881 ~ November 2, 1910

Memory Eternal ~ Вѣчная Память

Friend and Intended Life-Companion (Спутник Жизни) of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky

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The two innocent boys pictured in this photo might have romantic feelings for each other. In the secret recesses of their own minds if not out loud to others, they might describe their attachment as being in love with each other. Young children often experience romantic love for someone of the opposite or their own gender in all the freshness of innocence.

Every gay man from young adulthood to old age with whom I have ever spoken about these things—and there have been hundreds, over the years—was the age of these boys or younger when he realized, or began to realize, that he had the same interest in boys that most other boys had in girls. Ritch C. Savin-Williams begins his essay on gay teens, “Memories of Same-Sex Attractions” (Men’s Lives, 8th Edition, New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2010: 86-103), with the following introduction: Read More