This article refers mainly to the Josiah Trenham: The Scandal section in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Archives 2020, to which a number of new titles will be added beginning the evening of February 12.

Via multiple posts and articles full of hysteria, wild exaggerations, distortions, and innuendos Giacomo Sanfilippo (also known as Peter J. SanFilippo), has been relentlessly defaming and attacking several Orthodox Christian priests, bishops, and seminary professors. Why? Because these men dare to publicly and fearlessly defend the Orthodox Church teaching on homosexual sin and warn the Church about many false teachers (like Sanfilippo) and deceitful venues that question, challenge, mock, deconstruct, contradict, and distort Church teaching, practices, and theology, especially regarding morality, human sexuality, and marriage.

Since 2017 Sanfilippo has used his inappropriately named “Orthodoxy in Dialogue” website, his Facebook pages, and his Twitter accounts to maliciously condemn these good men and smear their reputations. Sanfilippo has launched an unholy personal vendetta against these priests and teachers and is fomenting rebellion inside the Holy Orthodox Church. Read More

Over the weekend Orthodoxy in Dialogue reached the amazing milestone of 500,000 views in our short two and a half years of publication. It’s you—our loyal readers, subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook group members, Patrons, guest writers, letter writers, and even our haters!—who have made this possible. Thank you so much!

Many, many thanks also to the several of you who, your names unknown to each other, not only bought us a new computer but paid our WordPress fees through July 2021. Only with your generous contributions are we able to carry on.

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Less than an hour ago I was posting a discussion question to Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Facebook page when I was thrown off Facebook. I was put through a series of security steps, made to submit a photo of myself, and told that my “submission” is “under review.”

Friends have emailed and tweeted to tell me that my personal page and everything I have ever posted to our Facebook group have vanished.

I’m wondering if one of Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s more devoted and ambitious enemies is messing with us. Read More

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So, brethren, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.

Gal 4:31

Perhaps no other Christian confession is as well known (or notorious) as Orthodoxy for the centrality of ancient tradition to its life and worship. As most ex-Protestant converts may know, a positive sense of “tradition” (paradosis) has biblical roots and features throughout the early centuries of Christian theological thinking. But the revival of interest in Christianity’s ancient tradition should raise a concern: Is our thinking about tradition as stable as the tradition itself? With more militant expressions of radical traditionalism on the rise in both the US and historically Orthodox countries, this question has never been more pressing.

At least in North America and Europe, it seems that Orthodox Christianity has deeply imbibed the modern idea of tradition as a discourse that constitutes an essential aspect of a person’s identity within a certain community and context in history. The notion that tradition thereby provides a stable grounding for faith and morals represents a kind of “right-wing postmodernism” that is associated (very roughly) with renowned philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre and popularized by books like The Benedict Option. Though written some decades prior to MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Vladimir Lossky’s claim that Orthodox tradition is “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church” offers fertile soil wherein this late 20th-century rediscovery of tradition—which also inspires Roman Catholic and even Protestant Christians—might flourish and take on a distinctive character, but not without a unique set of difficulties. Read More