Tag Archives: Maximus the Confessor

Ethics in the Book of Nature
The Climate Crisis and Ecological Sin, Part 1

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 the world has been enduring the past few years are indeed occurring with greater frequency. On 6 June 2022, Dr. Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC, described its sixth and most recent report as “a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” stating:

“climate change is a grave and mounting threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future. We are not on track to achieve a climate-resilient sustainable world.”

As the years pass, the IPCC’s reports grow more and more dire, yet humanity continues to fail to take the appropriate actions to alleviate our ecological crises. Back in September 2021, our global ecological reality had grown so severe that, despite the theological and doctrinal differences of their churches, the hierarchs of the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican branches of Christianity came together for the first time in history to issue a joint statement to address the world’s Christian oecumene with a single moral voice. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, Pope Francis, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, called for the protection of creation claiming that the “current climate crisis speaks volumes about who we are and how we view and treat God’s creation” (A Joint Statement for the Protection of Creation, 1 September 2021, p. 3).

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Nomadland: The Heavenly Homecoming of the Nomads

The original Greek version of this article was published in the site “Polymeros kai Polytropos” of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies.

The film Nomadland (2020) offers a spiritual glimpse into America, especially into the Western states, with the help of Chloé Zhao, a young director from China. This is a road movie in the most spiritual sense of the term, where making a road trip is a way to deal with bereavement as well as with feeling useless in a difficult age just before retirement. The film takes place in 2011, during the first years of the economic crisis that had started in 2008. The protagonist of the movie is Fern, a 60-year-old woman who had just lost her husband, but also her work, after the US Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada shut down. Each loss is also a painful liberation, and Fern decides to sell her belongings in order to buy a van and cross the country in search of seasonal jobs. The film is based on a documentary by Jessica Bruder on the subcultures of van-dwellers who move from state to state in search of work in the context of the precarity that is inherent in late capitalism. However, the director Chloé Zhao has added her personal existential touch. The film has been very influential in this difficult year of lockdown. This is also reflected in the many awards it has received, including an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Golden Lion for Best Picture, as well as an Oscar for best director and an Oscar for best actress in a leading role (Frances McDormand).

The van-dwelling culture

Fern is in a difficult age: too old to start her life anew with the vigour of youth, too young to retire. She belongs to a new generation of out-of-works among the middle-aged and those who are at the threshold of the third age. For the latter, it is very difficult to acquire the new skills needed to respond to the dynamic form of contemporary work relations, and thus they succumb to the low self-esteem of unbearable uselessness. Fern, however, combines an openness to life, including its failures and frustrations, with an unexpected dynamism. After a seasonal job at Amazon, she is invited to the Arizona desert, where Bob Wells leads a community that offers help to these new nomads, teaching them basic survival rules in this postmodern version of the Wild West. In many aspects, this is a community of moribunds, for example, people with late-stage cancer. The latter are, however, readier than Fern both for death and for temporary survival in the wild life of these new anchorites. Some of the nomads give naturalistic meanings to death, according to a death coaching that is but the natural consummation of life coaching, as a training for achieving a “successful” death that would be the coronation of a successful life. Nevertheless, other people, such as Bob Wells, invest in love toward unknown fellow men and women, telling them what they didn’t have the chance to tell people that they have lost. In the unknown people of the nomadic communities, they find “images” of the departed; they regard life as a way, where one can find again the loved ones either in other persons or even, as the film alludes, in the continuation of the life-trip in an after-life beyond death.

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Rethinking Patristic Categories? A Response to Petre Maican

by Fr. David G. Bissias

If it were not well-intentioned, Petre Maican’s article “Image and Likeness and Profound Cognitive Disability: Rethinking Patristic Categories” (published on Public Orthodoxy, July 2, 2019), could be offensive. In the final analysis, it is simply misguided due to several failures: of coherency, doctrinal perspective, and a failure to grasp the full “spectrum of human existence” for which he rightly expresses concern.

Maican’s argument is unconvincing for several reasons. It is summarized in a few sentences from his opening paragraph:

Is it useful to speak about image and likeness in the cases of persons with profound intellectual disabilities? I think not. Especially, when the main requirement for attaining likeness is ethical freedom. As I will point out further, since the movement from image to likeness is dependent on the use of freedom, persons with profound cognitive disabilities are excluded from attaining the goal of their own existence, perfection in Christ.^[1]

Maican properly believes a “robust” Orthodox anthropology must affirm why any person, including the profoundly disabled, “should live” and why such a life is “worth it.” Continue reading →

Would the True “Nature” Please Stand Up?

by Rev. Dr. Vasileios Thermos

This essay is part of a series stemming from the ongoing research project “Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Identity and the Challenges of Pluralism and Sexual Diversity in a Secular Age,” which is a joint venture by scholars from Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center and the University of Exeter, funded by the British Council, Friends of the British Council, and the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the British Council’s “Bridging Voices” programme. In August 2019, 55 scholars gathered for an international conference at St Stephen’s House, Oxford. These essays are summaries of presentations given in preparation for the conference and during it. They together reflect the genuine diversity of opinion that was represented at the conference and testify to the need for further reflection and dialogue on these complex and controversial topics.

Thomas Aquinas

Does anyone still believe that the biblical “confusion of tongues” (cf. Gen 11:1–9) refers only to the proliferation of human languages? Popular discussions about homosexuality and gender dysphoria today suggest, similarly, that what seemed commonplace about human sexuality to previous generations is not so common anymore.

Contemporary moral objections to phenomena like homosexuality or gender dysphoria often rely on what we might call the “nature argument”: “this is unnatural,” “this is against nature,” and so on. Such an argument is not confined to those outside the Church. Orthodox Christians, too, make it. Indeed, one crucial hindrance to the Orthodox Church’s efforts to shape a more constructive attitude towards homosexuals and trans people is the idea of “nature” held by many of her members.

Should the Orthodox Church, however, cherish the same logic used by those outside the Church, some of whom invoke the nature argument not only to exclude homosexuals and trans people but also to rationalize hostility or even violence towards them? Is Orthodox theology at all compatible with such an idea of “nature”? Continue reading →