Anyone watching the news today is aware that we are living in an age where secular forms of diversity and pluralism are valued over and above biblical truth. This applies especially to issues of gender and sexuality. Activists in the so-called LGBTQ movement have successfully challenged traditional Christian understandings of marriage and family in nearly…
Continue readingConjugal Friendship
One of the more useful insights of postmodernism, so self-evident that it hardly needs to be said, is that reframing one’s fundamental question will produce a different answer. To the question, “Can two persons of the same gender ‘have sex’ with each other?” we hear from Holy Tradition a resounding no. Yet if we ask,…
Continue readingLife-Bearing Love: A Too Risky Vision
by Maria McDowell The upcoming Great Council, decades in the making, is an opportunity for Orthodoxy to present to the world a vision of the fruitfulness of love ripened through relationships in which we are simultaneously co-workers in one another’s deification and co-workers with God through whom all creation bears life. The Synod is an…
Continue readingSexual Purity and the Vocation of Marriage
by David C. Ford, Mary Ford, Rev. Dr. Philip LeMasters, Philip Mamalakis, and Alf Kentigern Siewers “The sacred nature of the God-established union and its lofty spiritual content explain the Apostle’s affirmation in Heb. 13:4. That is why the Orthodox Church condemned any defilement of its purity (Eph. 5:2-5, 1 Thes. 4:4, Heb. 13:4ff)” (Chambesy…
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