Archdeacon John Chryssavgis has recently commented on the way in which, during the COVID pandemic, many of the leaders of the Orthodox Church have “been almost paralysed by division among themselves and by their isolation from the outside world.” He relates this paralysis to a number of important issues, but does not comment in detail…
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The Climate Crisis and Ecological Sin, Part 2
by Chris Durante In 1997, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople coined the term “ecological sin[1]” and since then his idea has come to influence a number of thinkers both within the Orthodox Church as well as others; the most prominent of which has been Pope Francis, who cites Bartholomew in his 2015 encyclical Laudato…
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The Climate Crisis and Ecological Sin, Part 1
by Chris Durante With another season of creation care upon us, we should take heed of the fact that the most recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) respectively affirm, for the first time, that climate change is in fact the result of human activities and that the catastrophic climactic events that…
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Lessons from a Russian Orthodox Scientist, Part 3
by Christopher Howell | български | ქართული | ελληνικά | Română | Русский | Српски In two previous posts, I covered the scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s scientific and political views. The third area I would like to focus on is religion, where we are on less stable ground. Dobzhansky’s views on religion were idiosyncratic and highly…
Continue readingThe Camel and Needle
Lessons from a Russian Orthodox Scientist, Part 2
by Christopher Howell | български | ქართული | ελληνικά Read Part 1: Between Darwin and Dostoevsky Freedom mattered to Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was concerned to articulate a scientific worldview in which Darwin buttressed free will, and he felt it helped answer the problem of evil (offering an early version of the “free process defense” to…
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Lessons from a Russian Orthodox Scientist, Part 1
When he was young and Russia was in the throes of revolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) felt the “urgency of finding a meaning of life…in the bloody tumult.” But he was stuck between two poles that drew him equally: religion and science. He loved Darwin and he loved Dostoevsky. “The intellectual stimulation derived from the works…
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