Bridging the Ecclesial, the Academic, and the Political
When it comes to Orthodox tradition and LGBT inclusion, there is often a gulf between contemporary rhetoric, which tends to categorize sexual sin in absolute terms, and historical sources, which are often more ambiguous and open to interpretation. One of the most influential texts addressing LGBT inclusion is late theologian Thomas Hopko’s 2006 book Christian…
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The Path of Saint Anthony is a pilgrimage in contemporary Ukraine that its participants experience as a form of spiritual resistance to war. Dedicated to the Venerable Anthony of the Kyiv Caves, it seemed to me, amid the unresolved crisis in Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the disheartenment of endless war, perhaps the freshest and most profound…
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Earlier this year, Drs. David Ford and Mary Ford offered a response to my previous article on Christian masculinity and its patriarchal distortions. While I appreciate their sincere and thoughtful engagement with my position, I also contend that their arguments in support of male headship are based on a confusion between historical precedent and genuine…
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Gender is a charged topic in the Church today. Some might say that gender differences are fixed and unchanging as God intended them in this way. Others might say that gender is a social construct, and, like other social constructs, it can be rebuilt in whatever way one desires. Yet it may come as a…
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I’ve started to wonder about the nature of Constantine’s dream and vision, predominantly because I have family in the military that desperately want to leave. They’re stationed at one of the deadliest bases in the country—deadly mainly from suicide—and often say they’re surrounded by “the worst human beings imaginable.” They’re scared, burnt out, belittled, alienated,…
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Much ink has been spilled on the subject of Christ’s siblings. Rather than indulging in the all-too-familiar debates about the meaning of the words “brother” (ἀδελφοί) and “sisters” (ἀδελφαί), and how they should be interpreted, we will take for granted the position held universally by early Byzantine sources and within the early and medieval Church:…
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A common misunderstanding of classical evolutionary theory is that the “fittest” organisms that natural selection favors are merely those who have mastered their environmental milieux. Even in Darwinian terms, that is an impoverished picture; if it were the whole story, it would not be a formula for the preservation of actual life and of adaptive change, but only of a sterile persistence that would soon exhaust itself and die away. As far as the advancement of organisms towards higher, richer, and more capable forms is concerned, fragility is every bit as important as durability, and exposure as important as safety.
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I come into this conversation as something of a gadfly. I agree with its fundamental premise in only a qualified way, and with the concerns about suppression of speech that motivate it hardly at all.
Let us take the premise first. The statement by Jaroslav Pelikan is from an address he gave at Valparaiso University in 1966. This was long before his conversion to Orthodoxy, while his outlook was still that of a Lutheran and his historical understanding was still relatively immature.
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The Church is free. It is free to do whatever is needed for the good of the faithful and to further its mission to make disciples of all nations. Yet in the modern era, the Orthodox Church is shackled by a serious shortcoming, namely the lack of an effective mechanism for conciliarity.
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This article explores the uniquely human capacity for speech, its evolutionary origins, and its profound significance in shaping thought, creativity, and social cooperation. It examines the biological and genetic foundations of speech and discusses how speech not only enables communication but also holds a sacred role in Orthodox praxis and personal development. This highlights the importance of free speech in the pursuit of truth and the expression of our humanity.
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