Public Orthodoxy was the first to bring my doctoral work on Father Pavel Florensky’s theology of same-sex love to public attention with my Conjugal Friendship of May 2, 2017. I remain grateful to the editors not only for their decision to publish it, but also their patient guidance in helping me make it as perfect as I humanly could.

I’m also grateful to the editors for bringing the conversation back to the pages of Public Orthodoxy with the publication of Paul Ladouceur’s and Father Richard René’s Father Pavel Florensky, Philia, and Same-Sex Love of February 26, 2021, and to the authors for considering my work worthy of their consternation.

With that being said, Ladouceur’s and René’s response to my total immersion—through eight long years of MA and PhD research—in Father Florensky, his writings, his life, and his social/historical/cultural context raises questions at every turn.

The Bible as a book does not exist. Tell this to the fundamentalist who is of the opinion that it is the inspired, verbatim word of God ‘”Himself.” But the Bible is composed of poems and parables, stories, and symbols. The language of the Bible is, in the main, figurative, allegorical, analogical, metaphorical more than metaphysical, lyrical rather than literal.

Fundamentalism is a form of religious literalism in relation to the reading of scriptural texts. Like the psychotic who takes words as things, the religious fundamentalist’s thinking is concrete; he/she engages in reification and hypostatization. The fundamentalist is unswervingly attached to the truth of their beliefs and to the importance of maintaining a strict demarcation between the ingroup and the outgroup. Fundamentalism rejects diversity of reasoned opinion, holding that their interpretation is the truth. Their reading of Scripture is selective. It harbours a prior ideological conviction and an uncompromisingly covert—and frequently overt—personalised stance, imbued through and through with presuppositions and prejudices. The fundamentalist sees through the prism (prison) of their own projections. This theological and puritanical  puerility is passed off as unbiased, pristine purity, whereas in fact it is a deformity that ultimately distorts texts and damages lives. The fundamentalist believes in uniformity and univocity, in divine oracles and uncorrupted doctrines, untainted by human history, intervention, and interpretation.

Today we received the following email from Change.org regarding Michael Sisco’s petition against Orthodoxy in Dialogue and our editor:

Hello,

We’re sorry to hear that you’re having a negative experience with a Change.org user’s petition.

Thank you for writing to us to flag this content. Our team has determined that content in this petition violates our [Community Guidelines](https://www.change.org/policies/community) in relation to privacy, and we have now removed the personal information we identified.